In this episode, I talk with Elissa Newport, Professor of Neurology and Rehabilitation Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center, about her work on the neural and cognitive underpinnings of language development, including statistical learning, language after perinatal stroke, lateralization, plasticity, the critical period, and more.

Saffran JR, Aslin RN, Newport EL. Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science 1996; 274: 1926-8. [doi]

Newport EL, Landau B, Seydell-Greenwald A, Turkeltaub PE, Chambers CE, Dromerick AW, Carpenter J, Berl MM, Gaillard WD. Revisiting Lenneberg’s hypotheses about early developmental plasticity: Language organization after left-hemisphere perinatal stroke. Biolinguistics 2017; 11: 407-22. [doi]

Olulade OA, Seydell-Greenwald A, Chambers CE, Turkeltaub PE, Dromerick AW, Berl MM, Gaillard WD, Newport EL. The neural basis of language development: Changes in lateralization over age. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2020; 117: 23477-83. [doi]

Elissa Newport’s website