Christopher Hirsch

Statement of Purpose

I have spent my time here at Berkeley camped at the crossroads where linguistics meets neuroscience. I hope to dedicate my graduate studies to the neural demystification of what is arguably the highest form of human cognition: language. With a father who practices psychology and a mother who teaches French language and literature, this path seems only natural. My involvement with the formal study of language materialized early on, for I spent K-8 in a French immersion program with history, math, science, and even P.E conducted exclusively in French. As an International Baccalaureate candidate, my passion for language grew in high school, where foreign languages were heavily emphasized. Those experiences, coupled with the numerous French courses I took at the local community college at that time, led to my completing a French minor at Berkeley. My dedication toward the study of the brain is no less passionate. From my first courses in psychology and biology in high school to those in neuroantatomy, cognitive neuropsychology, and the cognitive sciences, coupled with years in research labs at the university level, the investigation of the brain has been at the forefront of my intellectual development.

My true passion, neurolinguistics, is the logical conjunction of these two fields. I am interested in continuing my post-Baccalaureate studies in a combination of neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. I hope to do research with neurologically impaired populations, specifically aphasic studies investigating syntactic and semantic comprehension after neurological damage. The data available to the traditional linguist, i.e. grammatical judgments, severely underdetermine any linguistic theory. In this regard, I take the tools of neuropsychology, and of the neurosciences in general, to be requirements of the linguist’s tool-belt today. I believe linguistic theory is the best tool currently available for those hoping to map the language areas of the brain, with psycholinguistic and neuroscientific data being necessary to confine the requisite problem space. Beyond the simple scientific curiosity of how the brain computes language, the research I hope to pursue also has numerous practical applications, especially as it relates to the treatment of patients suffering from Broca’s aphasia. Without a clear neurolinguistic understanding of the deficit, treatment and recovery seem hopeless. On the other hand, if the linguistic principles that underlie the disorder can be discovered and clarified, perhaps limited recovery is possible.

To these ends, I have pursued dual degrees in linguistics and cognitive science, with emphases on syntax and semantics, and neuropsychology and computational modeling, respectively. Having finished both of my majors, as well as my French minor, in three years, this past semester afforded me the opportunity to take graduate courses in theoretical syntax and semantics, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive science, and fMRI methodology, all of which have helped me to better focus my research interests, and more importantly, to convince me that I am capable of excelling in a graduate environment. I have also been working under the advisement of Professor Andreas Kathol toward the completion of my linguistics honor’s thesis, which questions whether argument movement is the right approach for understanding the comprehension deficit in Broca’s aphasia. I am to begin high-field (4T) fMRI scanning in early 2002, with a follow-up fMRI experiment to that of Stromswold and colleagues that will attempt to provide neuroimaging data that can be used to make impartial claims as to whether Broca’s area subserves syntactic movement and dependency relations, and thus if transformational approaches are justifiable for the study of Broca’s aphasia. I am also conducting more traditional linguistic research into Hungarian, both for aphasics and normals, with the goal of challenging how a transformational theory such as Grodzinsky’s Trace-Deletion Hypothesis can account for the linguistic data within a nonconfigurational language, where no R(eferential)-strategy is possible.

I am currently doing research in Dr. Mark D’Esposito’s functional neuroimaging laboratory, working on several projects related to oculomotor responses, object selection and spatial selection, all involving functional MRI. As a result of this work, I will be co-presenting the results of a study investigating the maintenance of spatial information during an oculomotor delayed-response task in a poster presentation at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in March 2002. I have also published an article on the neural implementation of affective and nonaffective prosody, and a review of Tarski’s Semantic Theory of Truth in The Thinker, U.C. Berkeley’s journal of cognitive science. As well, I have spent time as a research assistant working in Professor Richard Ivry’s Cognition and Action laboratory, pursuing research relating to the neural basis of motor control and motor learning in humans. This research has led me to become skilled in Visual Basic, E-Prime, VoxBo, Matlab, GRAPES, Microsoft Office, Unix, Linux and Windows environments, as well as hardware and software troubleshooting.

Outside of research and classes, I also strive to keep involved in extracurricular activities. I have played on a total of 12 intramural sports teams, including indoor, outdoor, and speed soccer, men’s and coed softball, and volleyball squads. During my freshman year, my passion for student-run sports led me to become the intramural sports coordinator for my residence hall. As a junior, my positive experience being published in The Thinker led me to join the staff as a senior editor, a position I still hold. My greatest rewards, though, have come from my teaching. This past semester I was asked to be a teaching assistant for the cognitive science department, the first time in the department’s history that an undergraduate had been selected for such a position. As a TA for the major’s introductory cognitive science course my duties included preparing and leading weekly student discussion sections, review sessions, and the grading of homework, papers, and exams. I am most enthusiastic, though, about the teaching assistant position I have maintained for the past year in Berkeley’s computer science department, which U.S. News & World Report ranks as number two in the nation. Working under the tutelage of Professor Dan Garcia for three semesters, this position has allowed me to hone my abilities to communicate complex and technical ideas by lecturing to and leading several student discussion sections, laboratories, 300 to 350-person review sessions, keeping office hours and giving guest lectures. The position also included refining the course curriculum and writing and grading exams and projects.

My background in linguistics and neuropsychology, my experience with different empirical methods, and my dedication to the neuroscientific study of language make me a strong candidate for your program. With the support of your faculty, I will take the lead in clarifying how the brain computes language.