Age of acquisition effects on sign language development and brain processing Age of first-language age of acquisition, L1 AoA, has lifelong effects on language abilities and brain language processing. Infants born deaf often first experience language at a variety of ages due to an inability to perceive spoken language and not being exposed to sign language until older ages. We use this naturally occurring variation in L1 AoA to model the critical period for language. In a series of studies, ask what the language and neural correlates of the critical period might be. We test the hypothesis the organization of the brain language system is an emergent property arising from interactive effects between language experience and acquisition and post-natal brain growth. We test the hypothesis with two developmental paradigms, retrospective and longitudinal. The retrospective studies test deaf adults whose ASL acquisition is complete. These studies investigate whether L1 AoA effects between the ages of 1-8 are linear with respect to the level of syntactic complexity acquired, the locus and distribution of neurolinguistic processing, and characteristics of the dorsal and ventral white matter tracts. The longitudinal studies test deaf adolescents whose ASL acquisition may be ongoing and whose L1 AoA began in infancy, or in early or late childhood. The adolescents are tested annually for three consecutive years with same experiments as used in the adult study. The language experiments are designed to test the comprehension and production of ASL sentence structure as a function of syntactic complexity. The experimental paradigms are sentence-to-picture matching, elicited imitation, syntactic priming, and spontaneous production. The neurolinguistic experiments use fMRI to investigate sentence and lexical processing. The brain structure studies use DTI to investigate dorsal and ventral white matter tract development. If the brain language system requires linguistic experience during early post-natal brain growth to become fully functional, then levels of syntactic development should correspond with the distribution and location of neurolinguistic processing in the brain as well as with the robustness of white matter tract development in the brain language network.

Public Health Relevance

These experiments investigate the effects of age of language acquisition on the development of language and its neural processing in the brain. The subjects are deaf adults and adolescents. The results show how the age onset of language acquisition affects brain language processing.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01DC012797-08
Application #
10115687
Study Section
Language and Communication Study Section (LCOM)
Program Officer
Cooper, Judith
Project Start
2012-12-01
Project End
2023-11-30
Budget Start
2020-12-01
Budget End
2021-11-30
Support Year
8
Fiscal Year
2021
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
University of California, San Diego
Department
Type
University-Wide
DUNS #
804355790
City
La Jolla
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
92093
Cheng, Qi; Mayberry, Rachel I (2018) Acquiring a first language in adolescence: the case of basic word order in American Sign Language. J Child Lang :1-27
Mayberry, Rachel I; Davenport, Tristan; Roth, Austin et al. (2018) Neurolinguistic processing when the brain matures without language. Cortex 99:390-403
Lieberman, Amy M; Borovsky, Arielle; Mayberry, Rachel I (2018) Prediction in a visual language: real-time sentence processing in American Sign Language across development. Lang Cogn Neurosci 33:387-401
Ferjan Ramirez, Naja; Leonard, Matthew K; Davenport, Tristan S et al. (2016) Neural Language Processing in Adolescent First-Language Learners: Longitudinal Case Studies in American Sign Language. Cereb Cortex 26:1015-26
Lieberman, Amy M; Borovsky, Arielle; Hatrak, Marla et al. (2016) Where to look for American Sign Language (ASL) sublexical structure in the visual world: Reply to Salverda (2016). J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 42:2002-2006
Frederiksen, Anne Therese; Mayberry, Rachel I (2016) Who's on First? Investigating the referential hierarchy in simple native ASL narratives. Lingua 180:49-68
Hall, Matthew L; Ahn, Y Danbi; Mayberry, Rachel I et al. (2015) Production and comprehension show divergent constituent order preferences: Evidence from elicited pantomime. J Mem Lang 81:16-33
Hall, Matthew L; Ferreira, Victor S; Mayberry, Rachel I (2015) Syntactic priming in American Sign Language. PLoS One 10:e0119611
Davidson, Kathryn; Mayberry, Rachel I (2015) Do Adults Show an Effect of Delayed First Language Acquisition When Calculating Scalar Implicatures? Lang Acquis 22:329-354
Lieberman, Amy M; Borovsky, Arielle; Hatrak, Marla et al. (2015) Real-time processing of ASL signs: Delayed first language acquisition affects organization of the mental lexicon. J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 41:1130-9

Showing the most recent 10 out of 15 publications