Keynote Address 

Friday, May 23, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM 

Elissa Newport, Georgetown University

Developmental Plasticity and Language Reorganization After Pediatric Stroke

It is well known that the adult brain is highly lateralized for language: The left hemisphere is primarily responsible for sentence processing, the right hemisphere for processing emotion and intonation. However, many have suggested that there is plasticity for language in early life, allowing children to acquire language by using other cortical regions when left hemisphere language areas are damaged. Are these claims true? Which areas of the brain are capable of controlling language functions, and how well do they do this?  

Newport has been studying language processing and neural activation in teenagers and young adults who have had a stroke at birth to the left hemisphere brain areas ordinarily subserving language or to the right hemisphere areas ordinarily subserving the processing of emotion. Her results provide insights into the remarkable ability of the young brain to reorganize these functions in specific and highly constrained ways.  

Dr. Elissa Newport, Professor of Neurology and Rehabilitation Medicine at Georgetown University, has made landmark contributions to the study of language acquisition, leading to her election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. These contributions include documenting a critical period in the acquisition of second languages and infants’ striking ability to use of syllable transition probabilities to determine word boundaries.  Recently, she has addressed what happens to the typical brain lateralization of the left hemisphere for language and the right hemisphere for emotional processing and intonation when individuals sustain left hemisphere strokes at birth.  Her results reveal the remarkable plasticity of the brain to reorganize in highly constrained ways.