"Developmental plasticity and language reorganization after pediatric stroke"
Dr. Elissa Newport, Georgetown University
Monday, February 21st at 5:30 p.m., Zoom
About Dr. Newport
Elissa Newport is a Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Rehabilitation Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center and Director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, GUMC and MedStar National Rehabilitation Hospital.
Dr. Newport runs the Learning and Development Lab, which studies the acquisition of language,
the relationship between language acquisition and language structure, and the Pediatric Stroke Research Project,
which studies the recovery of language after damage to the brain early in life. Dr. Newport has been recognized by a number of organizations
for the impact of her theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of language acquisition. She has been elected as a fellow in the
Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Cognitive Science Society,
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Her research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the McDonnell Foundation,
and the Packard Foundation. In 2015 she received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science.
Abstract
It is well known that the adult human brain is highly lateralized for language, with the left hemisphere primarily responsible for sentence production and comprehension and the right hemisphere primarily responsible for suprasegmental aspects of language such as the expression of emotion and intonation. It has also long been hypothesized that there is a high degree of plasticity for language in early life, allowing young children to acquire language successfully by using other cortical regions for linguistic functions when the normal left hemisphere language areas are damaged. Are both of these claims true? If so, how do they fit together, and what are the principles and constraints on developmental plasticity and long-term functional organization? Which areas of the brain are capable of controlling language functions, and how well do they do this? If language is ‘reorganized’ to atypical regions, what happens to other cortical and cognitive functions?
We address these questions by focusing on long-term outcomes in a well-defined population of children with a single major injury at birth (perinatal arterial ischemic stroke to the middle cerebral artery). We study older children and young adults who have had a perinatal stroke to the left hemisphere brain areas ordinarily subserving language, or to the homologous right hemisphere areas ordinarily subserving the processing of emotion and spatial cognition. We are using a battery of behavioral tasks and fMRI to examine their processing and neural activation for language materials (sentence comprehension, emotional prosody) and for visual-spatial materials (line bisection, block configuration). We are also testing their healthy same-aged siblings and, in order to understand the early developmental status of these functions in the brain, a separate group of healthy children from ages 5 to 10. We believe that our results provide insights into both the striking lateralization of language functions in healthy adults and also the remarkable ability of the young brain to reorganize these functions in specific and highly constrained ways.
Suggested Reading
Lenneberg, E. (1969).On Explaining Language. In Science, 164, (635-643). [.pdf]
Newport, E. L., et al. (2017). Revisiting Lenneberg’s Hypotheses About Early Developmental Plasticity: Language Organization After Left-Hemisphere Perinatal Stroke. In Biolinguistics, 11 (407-421) [.pdf]
Olulade, O. A., et al. (2020). The neural basis of language development: Changes in lateralization over age. In PNAS 117(38) [.pdf]
