Project E7: Critical periods for the acquisition of German and of German Sign Language: Is being multilingual of any advantage?

Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Brigitte Röder, Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Barbara Hänel, Institute for Disability Studies    

Research Assistants:  Monique Kügow, Uta Salden, Nils Skotara 

Student Assistants: Melanie  Drewke, Malwine Masius, Lutz Pepping

Contact: biopsychologie@uni-hamburg.de

The aim of the present study is to uncover the experience dependence of language acquisition and to identify critical periods for learning a first and a second language.

Cooperation partners:

• Institut für Deutsche Gebärdensprache und Kommunikation Gehörloser (IDGS)
• Prof. Dr. Helen Neville, Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Oregon, USA
• Dr. Mairead MacSweeney, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK

Research questions

The functional organization of German (written language) and of German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS) is studied in deaf and hearing people, who have learned DGS and German at different ages.

The following questions are leading our research project:

• How does the delayed acquisition of a first language (L1) influence the competence in and the cerebral organization of an L1?
• Are there quantitative and/or qualitative differences between a delayed L1 acquisition and a delayed L2 acquisition learned, at the same age?

The cerebral organization for semantic and syntactic aspects of a  language are investigated with event-related brain potentials (ERPs).

Methods

Deaf people who had acquired DGS as L1 early in life and deaf adults who had learned DGS late in life will be investigated. Moreover hearing people who have learned DGS either form birth or later will participate in the study. Finally, we will study hearing adults who had learned German as an L1 or as an L2. We use event-related potentials (ERPs) of the EEG and partially functional magnetic resonance imaging to directly assess the brain systems related to both semantic and syntactic language aspects. Moreover, standardized language tests will be employed.

The general aim of the project is to improve our understanding of the differences between developmental and adult plasticity. In particular, more precise information about critical periods for learning a language as L1 and as L2 will be gained. These results might help to improve early (language) education for the Deaf, hard of hearing and hearing children.

Literature

• Bavelier, D., Corina, D. P., & Neville, H. J. (1998). Brain and language: a perspective from sign language. Neuron, 21(2), 275-278.
• Bavelier, D., & Neville, H. J. (2002). Cross-modal plasticity: Where and how. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3, 443-452.
• Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, Cognition and the Brain. Insights from sign language research. LEA: Mahwah, NJ.
• Mayberry, R. I., & Lock, E. (2003). Age constraints on first versus second language acquisition: evidence for linguistic plasticity and epigenesis. Brain Lang, 87(3 ), 369-384.
• Mayberry, R. I., Lock, E., & Kazmi, H. (2002). Linguistic ability and early language exposure. Nature, 417, 38.
• Neville, H. J. (1995). Developmental specificity in neurocognitive development in humans. M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The cognitive neurosciences, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 219-231.
• Neville, H. J., Bavelier, D., Corina, D., Rauschecker, J., Karni, A., Lalwani, A., Braun, A., Clark, V., Jezzard, P., & Turner, R. (1998). Cerebral organization for language in deaf and hearing subjects: Biological constraints and effects of experience. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 95(3), 922-929.
• Röder, B., & Neville, H. (2003). Developmental functional plasticity. J. Grafman, & I. Robertson (Eds.), Handbook of neuropsychology (Vol. 9). Elsevier.

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