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[References: 94 tit.]

We develop a manifestly Lorentz covariant chiral quark model for the study of baryons as bound states of constituent quarks dressed by a cloud of pseudoscalar mesons. The approach is based on a nonlinear chirally symmetric Lagrangian, which involves effective degrees of freedom—constituent quarks and the chiral (pseudoscalar meson) fields. In a first step, this Lagrangian can be used to perform a dressing of the constituent quarks by a cloud of light pseudoscalar mesons and other heavy states using the calculational technique of infrared dimensional regularization of loop diagrams. We calculate the dressed transition operators with a proper chiral expansion which are relevant for the interaction of quarks with external fields in the presence of a virtual meson cloud. In a second step, these dressed operators are used to calculate baryon matrix elements. Applications are worked out for the masses of the baryon octet, the meson-nucleon sigma terms, the magnetic moments of the baryon octet, the nucleon charge radii, the strong vector-meson-nucleon couplings, and the full momentum dependence of the electromagnetic form factors of the nucleon