Institute of Neuroscience Faculty

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.

• Yamada, Y., Neville, H.J. (in press). An ERP study of syntactic processing in English and nonsense sentences. Brain Research.

• Newman,A., Ullman, M.T., Pancheva, R., Waligura, D., Neville, H. (in press). An ERP study of regular and irregular English past tense inflection. NeuroImage.34(1):435-45

• Stevens, C., Sanders, L. and Neville, H. (2006). Neurophysiological evidence for selective auditory attention deficits in children with specific language impairment. Brain Research, 1111 (1): 143-152

• Sanders, L.D., Stevens, C., Coch, D., and Neville, H. (2006) Selective auditory attention in 3- to 5-year-old children: An event-related potential study. Neuropsychologia, 44 (11): 2126-38

• Sanders, L.D., Weber-Fox, C.M. and Neville, H.J. (in press). Varying degrees of plasticity in different subsystems within language. In, J. R. Pomerantz and M. Crair, (Eds), Topics in Integrative Neuroscience: From Cells to Cognition, Cambridge University Press.

• Stevens, C. and Neville, H. (2006). Neuroplasticity as a double-edged sword: Deaf enhancements and dyslexic deficits in motion processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18 (5): 701-714.

• Neville, H.J. (2006). Different profiles of plasticity within human cognition. In Y. Munakata and M. Johnson (Eds.), Processes of change in brain and cognitive development: Attention and Performance XXI. London:Oxford University Press, pp. 287-314.

• Fieger, A., Roeder, B., Teder-Salejarvi, W., Hillyard, S.A. and Neville, H.J. (2006). Auditory spatial tuning in late onset blind humans. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18 (2): 149-157.

• Coch, D., Skendzel, W. and Neville, H.J. (2005). Auditory and visual refractory period effects in children and adults: An ERP study. Clinical Neurophysiology 116:2184-2203.

• Coch, D., Skendzel, W, Grossi, G. and Neville H. (2005). Motion and color processing in school-age children and adults: An ERP study. Developmental Science 8(4):372-386.

• Neville, H.J. (2005). Development and plasticity of human cognition. In U. Mayr, E. Awh and S. Keele (Eds.). Developing individuality in the human brain: A tribute to Mike Posner. Washington DC:APA Books, pp. 209-235.

• Coch, D., Sanders, L.D. and Neville H.J. (2005). An ERP study of selective auditory attention in children and adults. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17 (4): 605-622.

• Coch, D., Grossi, G. Skendzel, W. and Neville, H (2005). ERP nonword rhyming effects in children and adults. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 17 (1): 168-182.

• Mills DL, Prat C, Zangl R, Stager CL, Neville HJ, Werker JF. (2004) Language experience and the organization of brain activity to phonetically similar words: ERP evidence from 14- and 20-month-olds. J Cogn Neurosci. 16 (8):1452-64.

• Mitchell TV, Neville HJ. (2004) Asynchronies in the development of electrophysiological responses to motion and color. J Cogn Neurosci. 16 (8):1363-74.

• Capek CM, Bavelier D, Corina D, Newman AJ, Jezzard P, Neville HJ. (2004) The cortical organization of audio-visual sentence comprehension: an fMRI study at 4 Tesla. Brain Res Cogn Brain Res. 20 (2): 111-9.

• Scherag A, Demuth L, Rosler F, Neville HJ, Roder B (2004) The effects of late acquisition of L2 and the consequences of immigration on L1 for semantic and morpho-syntactic language aspects. Cognition, 93 (3): B97-108.

• Fernandez-Duque D, Grossi G, Thornton IM, Neville HJ. (2003) Representation of change: separate electrophysiological markers of attention, awareness, and implicit processing. J Cogn Neurosci. 15 (4): 491-507.

• Fernandez-Duque, D., Grossi, G., Thornton, I.M., and Neville, H.J. (2003) Representation of change: separate electrophysiological markers of attention, awareness, and implicit processing. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 15: 491-507.

• Sanders, L.D. and Neville, H.J. (2003) An ERP study of continuous speech processing. I Segmentation, semantics, and syntax in native speakers. Brain Res. Cogn. Brain Res. 15 (3): 228-240.

• Sanders, L.D. and Neville, H.J. (2003) An ERP study of continuous speech processing. II. Segmentation, semantics, and syntax in non-native speakers.  Brain Res. Cogn. Brain Res. 15 (3): 214-227.

• Armstrong, B.A., Neville, H.J., Hillyard, S.A., Mitchell, T.V. (2002) Auditory deprivation affects processing of motion, but not color. Brain Res. Cogn. Brain Res. 14 (3): 422-434.

• Bavelier, D. and Neville, H.J. (2002) Cross-modal plasticity: where and how? Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 3 (6): 443-452.

• Newman, A.J., Bavelier, D., Corina, D., Jezzard, P., and Neville, H.J. (2002) A critical period for right hemisphere recruitment in American Sign Language processing. Nat. Neurosci. 5 (1): 76-80.

• Sanders, L.D., Neville, H.J., and Woldorff, M.G. (2002) Speech segmentation by native and non-native speakers: the use of lexical, syntactic, and stress-pattern cues. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 45 (3): 519-530.

• Sanders, L.D., Newport, E.L., and Neville, H.J. (2002) Segmenting nonsense: an event-related potential index of perceived onsets in continuous speech. Nat. Neurosci. 5 (7): 700-703.

• Grossi, G., Coch, D., Coffey-Corina, S., Holcomb, P.J., and Neville, H.J. (2001) Phonological processing in visual rhyming: a developmental erp study. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 13 (5): 610-625.

• Neville, H.J. and Bavelier, D. (2001) Variability of developmental plasticity. In Mechanisms of Cognitive Development: Behavioral & Neural Perspectives, J. McClelland and R. Siegler, eds., Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 421 p.

• Newman, A.J., Pancheva, R., Ozawa, K., Neville, H.J., and Ullman, M.T. (2001) An event-related fMRI study of syntactic and semantic violations. J. Psycholinguist Res. 30 (3): 339-364.

• Roder, B., Rosler, F., and Neville, H.J. (2001) Auditory memory in congenitally blind adults: a behavioral-electrophysiological investigation. Brain Res. Cogn. Brain Res. 11 (2): 289-303.

• Weber-Fox, C. and Neville, H.J. (2001) Sensitive periods differentiate processing of open- and closed-class words: an ERP study of bilinguals. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 44 (6): 1338-1353.

• Roder, B., Rosler, F., and Neville, H.J. (2000) Event-related potentials during auditory language processing in congenitally blind and sighted people. Neuropsychologia 38(11):1482-1502.

• Sanders, L.D. and Neville, H.J. (2000) Lexical, syntactic, and stress-pattern cues for speech segmentation. J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 43(6):1301-1321.

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• Department of Biology
• Department of Psychology
• Department of Human Physiology