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People Friendly Faces in the Lab  Dr. Laura Ann Petitto, DirectorDr. Laura Ann Petitto
is the Science Director and
Co-Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation and
Gallaudet University's Science of Learning Center ("Visual Language
and Visual Learning, VL2"). Dr. Petitto is known for her work on the biological bases of language, especially involving early language acquisition. Her studies of this topic span 30 years, beginning in 1973 with her research at Columbia University in which she attempted to teach sign language to a baby chimpanzee ("Project Nim Chimpsky"). She is presently known for her discoveries concerning how young human children acquire language, be it spoken or signed, and she has also probed the neural basis of language in the brain of adults using modern PET, MRI, fMRI, and functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) brain-imaging techniques. Taken together, her research points to the existence of select tissue in the human brain that helps young babies learn language, for example, the Superior Temporal Gyrus (STG)—tissue vital for young babies’ phonological segmentation of the linguistic stream around them. Presently, she and her outstanding
research team are exploring the nature of this STG brain tissue and its role in
early normal language development, atypical language development, and she has
recently launched an especially intensive series of studies regarding childhood
bilingualism. Petitto received her Masters and Doctoral degrees from Harvard
University in 1981 and 1984 (respectively) and built a vibrant laboratory in
Cognitive Neuroscience at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec) before moving to
Dartmouth in 2001. In fall 2007, Petitto continued her research
at the University of Toronto, and she has assumed her exciting
posts as Science Director and Co-Principal Investigator of the
National Science Foundation and Gallaudet University's Science
of Learning Center ("Visual Language and Visual Learning, VL2")
since Summer 2011. Kaja Jasinska, Graduate Student  Kaja Jasinska received a B.Sc. in Biology, Psychology and Linguistics from the University of Toronto and an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Western Ontario. Kaja’s M.A. thesis examined the relation between Theory of Mind and social communication in children with developmental language impairment. Kaja is a Ph.D. candidate in Dr. Petitto’s laboratory currently studying neural and genetic bases of language processing. She is working on projects that examine the patterns of neural activity during bilingual and monolingual children’s language processing using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). > Our lab alumni |
