RMayberry

Personal

Bio

Rachel Mayberry holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from McGill University in Communication Sciences and Disorders and Experimental Psychology and was recipient of a NIH New Investigator Award.  She is curre ntly Associate Professor in the UCSD Department of Linguistics and a member of the  Center for Research in Language, which she joined from McGill where she was a founding member of both the Center for Research on Language, Mind and Brain and the Inter-Disciplinary Doctoral Program in Language Acquisition, and served as Director of the School of Communication Sciences & Disorders.  Best known for her work on the critical period for language, she discovered that the critical period applies to first, but not second, language acquisition of signed and spoken languages.  She was lead editor of the influential book Language Acquisition by Eye, serves on the editorial board of Applied Psycholinguistics, and reviews for over 20 international journals and funding agencies.  Probing the nature of gesture in syntax processing, she found that iconic gesture emerges with initial syntactic development separately in each of bilingual children’s two languages, and that bouts of speech stuttering simultaneously disrupt syntactic complexity and iconic gesture expression in children and adults.  She also investigates the relation between reading and sign language development in English and American Sign Language (ASL), and French and Langue des signes québeçoise (LSQ).  Her work has been funded continually since 1989 in Canada by NSERC and SSHRC.

URL

http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~rmayberry/