Laura-Ann Petitto (born c. 1954) is a cognitive neuroscientist and a developmental cognitive neuroscientist known for her research and scientific discoveries involving the language capacity of chimpanzees,Petitto, L.A., "Nim Chimpsky: A Life That was Rich Beyond Words". The Washington Post, Saturday March 18, 2000.Seidenberg, M. S., & Petitto, L. A. (1987). Communication, symbolic communication, and language in child and chimpanzee: Comment on Savage-Rumbaugh, McDonald, Sevcik, Hopkins, and Rupert (1986). Journal of Experimental Psychology, General, 116(3), 279–287.Terrace, H.S., Petitto, L.A., Sanders, R.J., & Bever, T.G. (1979). Can an ape create a sentence? Science, 206, 891–902.Petitto, L.A., & Seidenberg, M.S. (1979). On the evidence for linguistic abilities in signing apes. Brain and Language, 8, 72–88.Seidenberg, M.S., & Petitto, L.A. (1979). Signing behavior in apes: A critical review. Cognition, 7, 177–215. the biological bases of language in humans, especially early language acquisition (be it language on the hands in signed languages or on the tongue in spoken languages),Petitto, L.A. (2005). How the brain begets language: On the neural tissue underlying human language acquisition. Chapter in J. McGilvray (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky. England: Cambridge University Press, pp 84–101.Petitto, L.A. (1997). In the beginning: On the genetic and environmental factors that make early language acquisition possible. In M. Gopnik (Ed.), The inheritance and innateness of grammars (pp. 45–69). England: Oxford University Press.Petitto, L.A. (1988). "Language" in the pre-linguistic child. In F. Kessel (Ed.), Development of language and language researchers: Essays in honor of Roger Brown (pp. 187–221). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. early reading,Jasinska, K.K., Berens, M., Kovelman, I., & Petitto, L.A. (2016). Bilingualism yields language-specific plasticity in left hemisphere’s circuitry for learning to read in young children. Neuropsychologia. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.11.018Jasińska, K. & Petitto, L.A. (2014). Development of Neural Systems for Reading in the Monolingual and Bilingual Brain: New Insights from functional Near Infrared and bilingualism, bilingual reading, and the bilingual brain.Petitto, L.A., Katerelos, M., Levy, B., Gauna, K., Tétrault, K., & Ferraro, V. (2001). Bilingual sign and oral language acquisition from birth: Implications for mechanisms underlying early bilingual language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 28(2), 453–496.Kovelman, I., Baker, S.A., & Petitto, L. A. (2008). Bilingual and Monolingual brains compared: An fMRI investigation of syntactic processing and a possible "neural signature" of bilingualism. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20(1), 153–169.Petitto, L.A., & Kovelman, I. (2003). The Bilingual Paradox: How signing-speaking bilingual children help us to resolve bilingual issues and teach us about the brain's mechanisms underlying all language acquisition. Learning Languages, 8(3), 5–18. Translation into French (2004). Le paradoxe du bilinguisme, Double langue maternelle. In Revue Imaginaire et Inconscient, 14.Kovelman, I., Baker, S.A., & Petitto, L.A. (2008). Age of first bilingual language exposure as a new window into bilingual reading development. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11(2), 203–223. Kovelman, I., Shalinsky, M.H., Berens, M.S., & Petitto, L.A. (2008). Shining light on the brain's "Bilingual Signature": a functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy investigation of semantic processing. NeuroImage, 39(1), 1457–1471. Significant scientific discoveries include the existence of linguistic babbling on the hands of deaf babies (“manual babbling”) and the equivalent neural processing of signed and spoken languages in the human brain.Petitto, L. A., Zatorre, R., Gauna, K., Nikelski, E.J., Dostie, D., & Evans, A. (2000). Speech-like cerebral activity in profoundly deaf people processing signed languages: Implications for the neural basis of human language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97(25), 13961-13966.Penhune, V., Cismaru, R., Dorsaint-Pierre, R., Petitto, L.A., & Zatorre, R. (2003). The morphometry of auditory cortex in the congenitally deaf measured using MRI. NeuroImage, 20, 1215–1225. She is recognized for her contributions to the creation of the new scientific discipline, called educational neuroscience.Petitto, L. A. (2009). New Discoveries from the Bilingual Brain and Mind Across the Lifespan: Implications for Education. International Journal of Mind, Brain and Education, 3(4), 185–197. L.A., & Dunbar, K.N. (2004). "New findings from Educational Neuroscience on Bilingual Brains, Scientific Brains, and the Educated Mind." Monograph, Department of Educational Neuroscience and Human Development, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H. @ http://petitto.net/home/about-dr-laura-ann-pettito/educational-neuroscience/ Petitto chaired a new undergraduate department at Dartmouth College, called "Educational Neuroscience and Human Development" (2002–2007), and was a Co-Principal Investigator in the National Science Foundation and Dartmouth's Science of Learning Center, called the "Center for Cognitive and Educational Neuroscience" (2004–2007). At Gallaudet University (2011–present), Petitto led a team in the creation of the first PhD in Educational Neuroscience program in the United States. Petitto is the Co-Principal Investigator as well as Science Director of the National Science Foundation and Gallaudet University’s Science of Learning Center, called the "Visual Language and Visual Learning Center (VL2)". Petitto is also founder and Scientific Director of the Brain and Language Laboratory for Neuroimaging (“BL2”) at Gallaudet University.Petitto Lab Homepage: http://petitto.net
Biography Education Petitto received her Bachelor of Science degree in 1975 from Ramapo College of New Jersey while taking undergraduate classes and conducting cross-species language research with the chimpanzee "Nim Chimpsky" at Columbia University (New York City, New York).Terrace, H. S. (1979). Nim. New York: Knopf. Petitto then conducted psycholinguistic research on American Sign Language (ASL) in the laboratory of Ursula Bellugi at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies (La Jolla, California), along with Linguist, Edward Klima, of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where Petitto began graduate study in the Department of Linguistics (1976–1977). Petitto continued graduate study at New York University (Master's degree, 1978, specializing in Rehabilitative Counseling Psychology and Deafness, 1977–1978). Petitto then researched the phonological structure of ASL in "The Linguistics Research Laboratory" of William Stokoe at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. (1978–1979). In 1979, Petitto began graduate study at Harvard University, Department of Human Development and Psychology, in its "Language & Cognition" track. While Roger Brown (primary Graduate Advisor)<ref
name=r1043 /> and Courtney Cazden (co-Advisor) were Petitto's mentors in "Cognition," Noam Chomsky at MIT was Petitto's mentor in "Language." Petitto first met the renowned Linguist when working with Nim Chimpsky on Project Nim in the mid 1970s and this intellectual mentorship endured throughout her Harvard graduate studies and for decades to follow.<ref
name=r1020 /> Petitto was graduated from Harvard with a master's degree in 1981, and a Doctorate/Ed.D. in March, 1984. Leaving Harvard in fall 1983 to take up her first faculty appointment in McGill University's Department of Psychology (Montreal, Quebec, Canada), Petitto also won a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (awarded to 10 young scientists in the USA). Commuting between McGill and Salk in her first few faculty years, Petitto studied with Ursula Bellugi and Francis Crick (Salk), and Elizabeth Bates (UCSD), intellectual mentorships that would span decades thereafter. Petitto's McGill psychology department role expanded when she also became a research scientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, and a collaborating scientist on The McDonnell-Pew Centre Grant in Cognitive Neuroscience with Brenda Milner, Michael Petrides (PIs), as well as with Robert Zatorre (1990–2001).Biography of Laura-Ann Petitto (2009). Who's Who in America 65th Edition. Marquis Who's Who: New Jersey"Child Minder: Psychologist Laura-Ann Petitto Reveals the Human Mind". McGill News Alumni Quarterly, Summer 1993
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, American Sign Language, 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; especially infants’ (ages 6–12 months) peaked neural sensitivity (involving the brain's STG and associated neural networks) to maximally-contrasting, rhythmic temporal patterning that in turn permits them to discover human language phonological structure in early life, and which is key to phonetic segmentation in word learning, discerning linguistic/syntactic patterning, and phonetic decoding in early reading, (3) the structure, grammar, and representation of natural signed languages of Deaf people, and (4) the nature of bilingual infants, children, and adults' dual language and reading development, processing, and bilingual brain organization.
Advancement of New Discipline: Petitto had an early role in the creation of a new scientific discipline with her colleague and husband Kevin Niall Dunbar, which they termed Educational Neuroscience. Educational Neuroscience is a sister discipline of Cognitive Neuroscience, in which basic neuroscience and behavioral science discoveries about the developing brain and the growing child are joined with their translational implications, towards the ultimate goal of solving core problems in society and the education of young children.