Current Events

Rhythms are found everywhere in biological systems, from motor movements for locomotion to communication signals such as speech and music. I will present evidence that infants are sensitive to musical rhythms from before birth and that temporal processing is a general principle of brain functioning. I will also present evidence that auditory-motor interactions for timing are present early in development and that the human auditory system uses the motor system to accomplish rhythmic timing. Finally, I will discuss the social implications of coordinated movements in human interactions from musical ensembles to pro-social behaviour in infants, and why music can improve wellbeing.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder affecting approximately 12% of all school-aged children and is characterized by hyperactivity, impulsivity, and inattention.  ADHD is highly heritable and recent large-scale studies have identified significant risk loci, yet its complex genetic architecture remains poorly characterized across non-European populations. This serves as a major problem as we move towards personalized medicine approaches. Previous studies have suggested that ancestral genetics cannot be generalized across polygenic risk prediction. In this presentation, I will talk about how we are approaching this critical issue and building diagnostic approaches that work for everyone. 

Sign languages provide a powerful window into the nature of human language because they express linguistic structure through the visual–manual modality rather than speech. In this talk, I review the past 50 years of psycholinguistic and neuroscience research showing that signed and spoken languages share fundamental properties in their structure, processing, and neural organization. Experimental studies demonstrate that signers exhibit many of the same patterns found in spoken language users, including phonological errors and systematic organization of the mental lexicon, while neuroimaging research shows that sign languages recruit the same left-hemisphere language networks traditionally associated with speech. More recent work has begun to explore how sensory modality differences shape language processing. I then present research from my lab examining early visual sensitivities to language in infants and children, highlighting the flexibility of the human language system.  I conclude with ethical and practical considerations for future research with the Deaf community.

TBA