When a teacher asked a youth recovering from a brain injury to "boot up" a computer, the teen kicked it.

Misinterpretations of word meanings, sarcasms and social cues like this are common for teens with head injuries and have long-range consequences in alienating them from peers, family members and co-workers.

In an effort to better understand these social language misinterpretations, Case Western Reserve University communication scientist Angela Ciccia, who earned her doctorate from Case in 2003, will become one of the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study teen communication.

Ciccia will use the technology to find out what part of the brain fires during communications in social situations for normal teens. With support from a New Investigator's Grant from the American Speech Language Hearing Foundation, she begins a one-year study in January.

"If we can understand how adolescents comprehend information by looking at how the brain processes it, then we may be able to create interventions that are more effective in changing behavior," she said.

About 5.3 million Americans are living with the effects of traumatic brain injuries, with adolescents suffering brain injuries most frequently. According to Ciccia, most teens receive their injuries from auto accidents that tend to damage either the frontal lobe of the brain used for self control, moral judgments and abstract thoughts or the temporal lobes where comprehension of language and word meanings takes place.

These injuries often result in inappropriate communication skills such as touching or laughing at the wrong times or an inability to understand teen talk, she said.

In her study, in an effort to understand how the brain comprehends social cues, Ciccia will gather fMRI images on 10 average adolescents between the ages of 18-21 as they watch videos of young people interacting with each other and answer questions.

Return to the online edition of the 12-18-03 Campus News.