Recruiting

Observational Study

Sponsor:

Massachusetts General Hospital

Code:

NCT05222594

Conditions

Language

Epilepsy

Eligibility Criteria

Sex: All

Age: 18 - 70+

Healthy Volunteers: Not accepted

Interventions

Behavioral tasks during intracranial monitoring

Study Details

Brief summary:

Language is a signature human cognitive skill, but the precise computations that support language understanding remain unknown. This study aims to combine high-quality human neural data obtained through intracranial recordings with advances in computational modeling of human cognition to shed light on the construction and understanding of speech.

Conditions

Language

Epilepsy

Study ID

NCT05222594

Start date

Apr 2, 2021

Status verified date

May, 2026

Completion date

Mar 31, 2027

Anticipated

Primary completion date

Mar 31, 2027

Anticipated

Eligibility Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

Sex: All

Age: 18 - 70+

Healthy Volunteers: Not accepted

Inclusion Criteria:

  • clinical indications to proceed with intracranial monitoring involving the left cerebral hemisphere, as determined by a multidisciplinary epilepsy surgery team
  • the ability to comply with test directions and provide informed consent
  • between ages 18 - 85

Exclusion Criteria:

  • inability to understand or perform the task outlined in the protocol, or who are unwilling or unable to participate

Study Design

Enrollment

40 participants

Anticipated

Intervention Model

Single group

Primary purpose

Basic Science

Interventions and Outcome Measures

Arms

other: Epileptic participants undergoing intracranial monitoring

Patients with pharmaco-resistant epilepsy undergoing intracranial monitoring involving the left cerebral hemisphere.

Interventions

Behavioral tasks during intracranial monitoring

Participants will listen to sentences and stories while neural data are recorded through electrodes placed for clinical purposes.

Primary outcome measure

  • Cortical maps of linguistic responses [ Time Frame: Throughout intracranial monitoring period, up to approximately 10 days ]
  • Neural time-courses during naturalistic language comprehension [ Time Frame: Throughout intracranial monitoring period, up to approximately 10 days ]
  • Brain scores for diverse artificial neural network (ANN) language models [ Time Frame: Throughout intracranial monitoring period, up to approximately 10 days ]

Central Contacts and Locations

Central contacts

Evelina Fedorenko, PhD

617-258-0670evelina9@mit.edu

Locations

Massachusetts General Hospital

Recruiting

Boston, Massachusetts, United States, 02114

Contacts

Robert M Richardson, MD, PhD

mark.richardson@harvard.mgh.edu

Erin Donahue, PhD

ekdonahue@mgh.harvard.edu

Principal Investigator:

Robert M Richardson, MD, PhD

More Information

Sponsor

Massachusetts General Hospital

Last update posted

May 7, 2026

Last verified

May, 2026

Keywords

  • language
  • computational neuroscience
  • epilepsy

Trial information was received from ClinicalTrials.gov and was last updated on 2026-09-10. This information was provided to ClinicalTrials.gov by Massachusetts General Hospital on 2026-05-07.