The program of studies outlined below is designed to address basic issues in developmental psycholinguistics and developmental neuropsychology. Each project investigates some facet of the relationship between language and affect, and each represents another means (via methodology or population) to address basic questions about underlying cognitive organization. Our overarching scientific goal is to expand our knowledge of the relevant components of these communicative systems, their boundaries and interactions, in order to better understand how the brain is organized. Within these parameters, our objective is to involve students in all phases of the research process such that they can go on to become independent scholars. Our research includes studies of facial expression and affective development in infants and toddlers with perinatal focal brain damage; the interplay of emotional expression and spoken language in preschoolers and school age children with focal brain lesions as well as in normal English speaking children. Another large project is devoted to facial expression in deaf singers, both in deaf children of deaf parents who are learning American Sign Language (ASL) as a first language, and in deaf adults who have suffered cerebral damage. Interestingly, facial expression is multifunctional in ASL; it conveys emotional and discourse information, as it does with spoken language, and in addition; specific facial behaviors signal certain grammatical structures, e.g., relative clauses, conditionals and topics. As affect/emotion is traditionally considered to be right hemisphere controlled function and language a left hemisphere function, the acquisition of grammatical facial expression in deaf children learning ASL, and deaf stroke victims represent ideal contexts to explore hemispheric organization for these superficially similar behaviors, i.e. facial expressions, which subserve two distinct and differently controlled communicative systems, language and affect.
