Brenda Rapp

The Society for the Neurobiology of Language is pleased to announce the 2026 Distinguished Career Award recipient: Brenda Rapp

How the brain spells words: A window onto the neurobiology of language

Thursday, October 1, 3:00 - 3:30 pm, Amphitheatre D

Speaker: Brenda Rapp, Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University

About Brenda Rapp

Professor Brenda Rapp is a professor in the Cognitive Science Department at Johns Hopkins University, and the long-standing Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Neuropsychology. She is a leading authority on the processes and representations of written language production.

To understand Brenda’s contributions, it is important to realize that, historically, language production research has been considerably overshadowed by language perception research, and even within language production research, written production has received scarce attention compared to spoken production. Brenda’s monumental contribution has been her tireless efforts in showing that written language production is not only worth studying per se but can also teach us much about how the language production system works. The fruit of this labor is over 150 publications, laying out a foundational framework to guide basic-science studies on written language production, as well as studies of dysgraphia (both acquired and developmental). Without this foundational work these subfields would not be nearly as coherent as they are today. Her body of research has been consistently characterized by its theoretical depth and methodological rigor as well as its commitment to learn from, and contribute to, the study of cognitive deficits.

Brenda is also one of the pioneers of research on the neural basis of written production, using a wide range of converging neural methods. She mapped the neurocognitive architecture of the spelling system with the first fMRI meta-analysis of word spelling (Purcell, et al., 2011) and the first lesion symptom mapping study of the central components of the spelling system (Rapp et al., 2016). This work revealed the neural organization of the spelling system, identifying separable spelling processes that are distinct from analogous spoken language processes. Furthermore, the work showed, for the first time, that the visual word form area (VWFA) is not just for reading, but contains orthographic representations of words, shared by both reading and spelling (Rapp & Lipka, 2011). This set of findings provided a solid basis for her subsequent and more recent work that has exemplified how functional neuroimaging can reveal highly detailed aspects of neural representations and how these are affected by learning, damage, and recovery.

Her team has established the existence of abstract, amodal letter representations within left ventral temporal-occipital cortex (VOTC) that constitute the building blocks of word spellings. The earliest stages of learning the spellings of new words result from the complex interplay between VOTC and subcortical (hippocampal) processes. In re-learning these representations in individuals with post-stroke dysgraphia, graph theoretic work carried out by her team showed that this recovery involves increased local network integration and modularity within the VOTC and increasing neural differentiation resulting in sparser and more compact neural representations. In short, Brenda’s research on the neurobiology of language has provided an increasingly more detailed understanding of the neurocognitive bases of written word production that extends from words to letters, from brain regions and networks to voxels.

In addition to her scientific contributions, Brenda has been an exemplary mentor. She has supported and mentored over 35 graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty, many of whom have gone on to hold positions in top research institutions. Brenda has also served the field in many capacities, but of particular note is her role in advancing the field of cognitive neuropsychology through her teaching and workshops across the world and for her work for 15 years as the Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Neuropsychology. Finally, she is the editor of the book “What Deficits Reveal about the Human Mind/Brain: A Handbook of Cognitive Neuropsychology.” - the classic text on cognitive neuropsychological research.