Scientific Contributions
Petitto’s research and discoveries span several scientific disciplines. Her early work with Nim Chimpsky and her later work with humans, encompasses anthropology, comparative ethology, evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive science, theoretical linguistics, philosophy, psychology, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, child development, evolutionary psychology, deaf studies, and bilingualism. Her overall discoveries involve:
- (1) cross-species (apes and humans) language and cognitive capacities,
- (2) the nature of early human language acquisition, structure, and representation in the human brain,
- (3) the structure, grammar, and representation of natural sign languages of Deaf people, and
- (4) the nature of bilingual infants, children, and adults’ dual language and reading development, processing, and brain organization.
Petitto had a leading international role in the creation of a new scientific discipline that she and her colleagues have termed Educational Neuroscience, involving the marriage of basic scientific discoveries about the developing brain/child with its principled application to solving core problems in the education of young children. Taken together, the major contribution of her scientific writings have been to offer both testable hypotheses and theory regarding the neural basis for the brain’s specialization for human language, and how it is possible for very young babies to acquire language.
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