PI Highlight
Dr. Karen Emmorey
Professor Karen Emmorey is the director of SDSU’s Laboratory for Language & Cognitive Neuroscience (LLCN). Her research focuses on what sign languages reveal about the nature of human language, cognition, and the brain. She studies the processes involved in how deaf people produce and comprehend sign language and how these processes are represented in the brain. Dr. Emmorey also investigates how experience with a signed language impacts nonlinguistic visual-spatial cognition, such as face processing, memory, and imagery.
“It’s on the tip of my finger!”
Her recent research shows that despite being unspoken, the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon exists in American Sign Language (ASL) and is known as the “tip of the finger” or “TOF” phenomenon.
Both speakers and signers experience that frustrating feeling of knowing a word/sign but not being able to retrieve it from memory. TOFs reveal that signs are not holistic gestures: meaning and form can be retrieved independently.
The brain knows the difference between signs and gestures
Her research also found that sign language activates a different part of the brain than hand gestures used for pantomime, even when signs look like pantomimes. These discoveries prove that signed and spoken languages are more similar than previously thought. For more information about the tip-of-the-finger phenomenon and about sign language and the brain please click on this link: http://universe.sdsu.edu/sdsu_newscenter/news.aspx?s=71910.
About the lab
The LLCN is home to one of the most comprehensive signed language research programs in the nation. This high–tech facility includes a filming studio, a head-mounted eye tracking system, and Optoptrak system which records and analyzes motor movements involved in signing. All members of the lab know American Sign Language, and Deaf and hearing researchers work together as a team.
About Dr. Emmorey
Dr. Karen Emmorey, professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences is the author of four books and more than 50 journal articles. Since her start at SDSU in 2005, Dr. Emmorey has received $2.5 million in grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Emmorey is a member of the Editorial Boards of several journals and is also a board member of SDSU Research Foundation.
For more information about Dr. Emmorey’s work or the Laboratory for Language and Cognition Neuroscience please click on this link: http://emmoreylab.sdsu.edu/ or email kemmorey@projects.sdsu.edu.