LMA Keynote, Prof Elissa Newport

Developmental plasticity and language after paediatric stroke

There are a number of specialized abilities in animals and humans that show time-limited periods during early life in which they are best acquired. In animals these include imprinting (attachment formation) in ducks and geese and species typical song in canaries and white-crowned sparrows. Many researchers have suggested that human language has similar characteristics and that languages are also best acquired during a critical or sensitive period early in life when the brain is especially plastic. I will talk about our research on how children and adults learn languages when first exposed to them at varying ages, and also on the outcomes we observe when children or adults have strokes to language areas of the brain. Our results support the claim that there is greatly enhanced plasticity for language early in life and that certain areas of the brain can take over for language acquisition when the normal left hemisphere language areas are damaged in infancy.

Elissa L. Newport, Ph.D., is Professor of Neurology, Rehabilitation Medicine, Psychology, and Linguistics, Co-Director of the Ph.D. Concentration in Cognitive Science, and Director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University. She moved to Georgetown in 2012, after 24 years at the University of Rochester, where she was the George Eastman Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and served for 12 years as Department Chair. Her primary research interests are in language acquisition in healthy children and recovery of language after pediatric stroke. Her research has been funded by the NIH since 1980. She has received the NIH Claude Pepper Award of Excellence, the APS William James Lifetime Achievement Award for Basic Research, the Benjamin Franklin Institute Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science, the Norman A. Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Experimental Psychology, and this year the American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. She has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2004.

For access to this seminar, please register here, a link will be sent to you within a few days of the talk. For later registrations, the link will be sent an hour before the start time.