Helen J. NevilleProfessor Emerita

Overview: Our broad goals are to study biological constraints and the role of input from the environment in the development of the human brain. We characterize the functional specializations of different neural systems in normal adults and take two broad approaches to the study of their development: We compare cerebral organization in normal hearing, sighted, monolingual adults with that observed in adults who have had auditory or visual deprivation or who have had different language experience (neuroplasticity). We study the changes in functional cerebral organization that occur as normally and abnormally developing infants and children attain different ages and behavioural milestones. We employ the event-related potential (ERP) techniques and structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in these studies.