Subjects

Laura Ann Petitto

Dr. Laura Ann Petitto is a cognitive neuroscientist, known for her discoveries involving the biological foundations of language in humans, animal language in chimpanzees, and bilingualism and the bilingual brain.

Petitto was a Project Coordinator of "Project Nim Chimpsky" at Columbia University where she lived with the chimpanzee and attempted to teach it sign language.

Petitto is also known for her discovery of manual babbling in Deaf children exposed to signed languages.

Petitto is currently the Scientific Director of the Brain and Language Laboratory (BL2) supported by Gallaudet University, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

In this lab, Petitto and her team study the neural processing of American Sign Language (ASL).

Suggested readings

Dr. Laura Ann Petitto. http://petitto.gallaudet.edu/~petitto/index/