Language Development after Perinatal Stroke

Developmental Plasticity and Language Outcomes after Perinatal stroke
Elissa L. Newport, George Bergeron Professor in Neurology, Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery, Georgetown University
The adult human brain is ‘lateralized’ for language, with the two hemispheres controlling different language skills. The left hemisphere is primarily responsible for sentence production and comprehension, while the right hemisphere is primarily responsible for the processing emotion in the voice. However, it has long been hypothesized that there is ‘plasticity’ for language in early life, allowing young children to acquire language successfully by using other brain regions when the left hemisphere language areas are damaged. Our research studies focus on these questions. Are these claims true? What is the outcome when infants or young children have a stroke that damages the typical language areas of the brain? Which areas are capable of controlling language, and how well do they do this?
We study these questions by observing and testing older children and young adults who have had a stroke at birth (an arterial ischemic perinatal stroke) either to the left hemisphere brain areas ordinarily supporting sentence processing, or to the right hemisphere areas ordinarily supporting the processing of vocal emotion. We use a battery of behavioral tasks and functional imaging to examine their processing and neural activation for sentence comprehension and vocal emotion, compared to their same-aged siblings who have not had a stroke. The children and young adults we study are very successful academically and also provide important insights for researchers and clinicians about plasticity, language, and the brain.
Elissa L. Newport, Ph.D., is Professor of Neurology, Rehabilitation Medicine, Psychology, and Linguistics, Co-Director of the Ph.D. Concentration in Cognitive Science, and Director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University. Her primary research interests are in language acquisition in healthy children and recovery of language after pediatric stroke.
Her research has been funded by the NIH since 1980 and has received the Claude Pepper Award of Excellence from NIH; she is currently funded by both NIH and NSF. In 2004 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She is a Fellow of the American Philosophical Society, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Cognitive Science Society, Society for Experimental Psychologists, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2013 she received the William James Lifetime Achievement Award for Basic Research from the Association for Psychological Science, in 2015 she received the Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science from the Benjamin Franklin Institute, in 2018 she received the Norman A. Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Experimental Psychology, and in 2020 she received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association.
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