By Theresa Sophie Bloder
I spent my first Secondment at the Graduate Center CUNY in Dr. Valerie Shafer’s Developmental Neurolinguistics Lab. The goal of this Lab is to understand the relationship between language and brain development, and later brain organization.
Research projects that are currently in progress use electrophysiological methods to examine brain processes. An understanding of the relationship between language and brain development and later brain organization will help explain the nature of developmental language disorders. At CUNY I was introduced to various pieces of software, hardware, and laboratory techniques common to research laboratories in the speech, language, and hearing sciences. I received hands-on experience on the generation, recording and analysis of sound, and learned to use the basic tools that are important for research in this field. Furthermore, I got to strengthen my understanding of the major issues of human communication (child language and language acquisition in particular) and its disorder.