   Funding
National Institutes of Health (NIH) R21 HD50558 “Infant’s Neural Basis for Language Using New NIRS” Petitto, (PI) National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 HD045822 “Behavioral and Neuroimaging Studies of Bilingual Reading Petitto, (PI) Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) “Brain, Behaviour, Genes: New Knowledge from Innovative Studies of Language and Reading in Monolingual and Bilingual Children Leads to Optimal Pathways to Remediation.” Petitto, (PI) Ontario Research Fund for Research Infrastructure Funding (ORF). Petitto, (PI) Recent Funding The Dana Foundation for the Arts Grant “Arts Education and Its Impact on the Brain and Knowledge Enhancement in Other Domains” (Petitto, Co-PI) |
Welcome to the Lab Welcome to Petitto’s New “Brain and Language Lab” or BL2 QuickLinks
Petitto’s present basic research is concerned with uncovering the biological mechanisms and environmental factors that together determine how our species acquires language, as well as how language is organized in the brain. Moving beyond the fact that language is lateralized largely in the Left Hemisphere of the human brain, her research extends to uncovering what is the precise neural basis of this Left Hemisphere language specialization: Is this tissue  dedicated to the production and processing of sound and speech, per se, or to aspects of the grammatical patterning that underlies all human language? What happens to specific neural tissue for language both (i) when it develops normally and (ii) when it develops in a-typical ways (as in Dyslexia)?  Other questions include how bilingual language exposure impacts the brain's neural circuitry for language, both in the developing bilingual children and in adult bilinguals, including when is the optimal age for bilingual language exposure? Petitto uses a number of innovative approaches, including (i) Cognitive Neuroscience investigations using modern brain-scanning techniques (fNIRS, fMRI, PET) of the neural substrates in the brain underlying monolingual and bilingual language representation and use, (ii) Cognitive Neurogenetic investigations (DNA polymorphism studies of clusters of genes linked with higher cognitive structures, functions, and processes) of language acquisition in young monolingual and bilingual children. In  addition, Petitto conducts basic studies of how signed languages are acquired in early life, especially, American Sign Language (ASL) and Langue des Signes Québécoise (LSQ) and how natural
signed languages (ASL and LSQ) are processed in the human brain using PET, fMRI, and, especially, fNIRS, and (iii) cross-species analyses of the extent to which chimpanzees can (and cannot) master aspects of human language (see her work as th e head/lead teacher and surrogate mother of PROJECT NIM (Project Nim Chimpsky, Columbia University) and subsequent analyses and scientific articles.
Recently, Petitto and her team have also pioneered the use of one brain imaging technology, called functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), regarding its measurement of brain tissue and the analysis and modeling of its collected brain data. > More About fNIRS See Our Exciting New & Current Projects!  Based collectively on all of Petitto's findings, she has proposed a testable Theory of how language is acquired that specifies the ways that genetic and environmental factors interact to produce language in children, and she has articulated a major testable hypothesis specifying the neural basis of the human language capacity in the adult brain. Go here to read some of the key discoveries about: What do "talking apes" tell us?  < How Children Acquire Language: New Answers  < Signed Languages & the Brain: A new window into the nature of human language Processing In Deaf & Hearing People  < American Sign Language: Are signed languages “real” languages?  |
