Welcome to the Corina Lab Website
The Corina Lab focuses on understanding the cognitive processing of signed languages.
Studies of American Sign Language (ASL) 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.
Our Cognitive Neurolinguistic Research Laboratory lead by Dr. David Corina is dedicated to understanding the processes of perceiving and producing signed and spoken languages. 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.
We conduct both behavioral and physiological experiments. Behavioral experiments are done on computers while our physiological experiments, similar to the behavioral experiments, have the addition of either EEG or MRI equipment to gather information about brain activity. We conduct most of our experiments at the Center for Mind and Brain in Davis and at the Imaging Research Center in Sacramento.
Please explore our lab website using the Navigation bar on the far left. Visit the Participate page to volunteer in an experiment.
Exploring the Mind Speaker Series - Dr. Paul Ekman, UC San Francisco