Welcome to the Corina Lab Website
Hello! Welcome to the Corina Lab website!
Here, you will find lots of information about what our lab does and how you can be a part of what we do.
What is the Corina Lab?
We are a group of graduate students, undergraduates, post-doctoral scholars, and specialists lead by Dr. David Corina. We study the cognitive neuroscience of signed and spoken languages and focus mainly on American Sign Language (ASL).
What does the Corina Lab do?
As researchers in neurolinguistics, we use specialized and advanced techniques to help us learn about how the human brain understands and produces signed language. Through our research, we hope to learn more about the psychological processes underlying the comprehension and production of sign languages of the deaf. We also explore whether and how sign languages differ from spoken languages and natural actions such as human action recognition and gesturing.
At the lab, we conduct experiments where volunteers simply make decisions about what they see on a computer screen. Sometimes we have online experiments and will travel to different areas to accommodate volunteers. We also do experiments using MRI and ERP equipment to gather information about brain activity.
Would you like to be a part of the study?
If you are interested in volunteering in our experiments, please visit the Participate page. We conduct most of our experiments at the Center for Mind and Brain in Davis and at the Imaging Research Center in Sacramento.
Why Study ASL?
Studies of American Sign Language offer unique insights into the fundamental properties of human language. Neurolinguistic studies explore how the brain and environment interact and influence the way deaf and hearing people produce and comprehend signed language. Some of the strongest evidence to date for the biological determination of human language comes from comparisons of spoken and signed languages. Data from a wide variety of studies (linguistic, psycholinguistic, aphasiology, and brain imaging) are providing keen insight into the human capacity for language. Studies are beginning to elucidate several issues that are of central importance to our understanding of human language, including the determination of hemispheric specialization, neural plasticity, and the contribution of symbolic, motoric, and linguistic processes in human language.