Gallaudet hosts international conference on how the brain produces and understands language

More than 500 researchers from around the world — including dozens of deaf and signing scientists — will converge at Gallaudet Sept. 12-14 for the 2025 Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL) Conference. SNL’s annual meeting is an opportunity for scientists with a variety of perspectives and methodological approaches to debate and discuss the intersection of neuroscience, linguistics, and psychology.

“Bringing it to Gallaudet will allow us to put an extra spotlight on sign language research,” says Dr. Lorna Quandt, an Associate Professor in Gallaudet’s PhD Program in Educational Neuroscience (PEN) and Co-Director of the Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) Center. As the local organizer of the event, and as a member of the 2025 program committee, Quandt says the SNL board is excited to be on such a unique campus. “Attendees will see that this entire university functions in sign language. I hope it’s eye-opening and mind-opening,” she adds.

A grant from the National Science Foundation is allowing SNL to significantly enhance the accessibility of the conference. “The funds from this grant will support interpreting, access, and important work to document and disseminate best practices for making these kinds of academic meetings truly accessible to the wider community,” Quandt says. 

Learning from sign language users

On the opening day, Quandt is introducing and moderating the panel, “Neuroplasticity in Action: Diversity in Language and Reading Across Sensory Contexts,” which will explore different ways that the brain can adapt to support language and literacy. The panel features sign language researchers, a braille linguist, and a neuroscientist who studies brain organization in people born with blindness, deafness, or without hands. “A lot of language research is focused on spoken or written language, but many people in the field know it isn’t limited to those modalities,” says Quandt, who hopes to spark new ideas by bringing attention to this innovative work. 

Dr. Carol Padden, who was the graduate keynote speaker and honorary degree recipient at Gallaudet’s 2025 Commencement ceremony, will be back to present Sunday’s keynote lecture on “The multimodal potential of human languages.” Padden — the Dean of Social Sciences and the Sanford I. Berman Chair in Language and Human Communication at the University of California, San Diego — will share how cases of sign language emergence from families, villages, and regions have also relied on hearing speakers.

New directions in research

Gallaudet faculty, students, and alumni are well represented in the five poster sessions, which cover an enormous array of topics. Dr. Rachel Pizzie, an Assistant Professor the PEN Program and Director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (CAN) Lab, along with graduate students Christina Kim, Rachel Sortino, and Rachel Inghram, will be presenting, “Validating the Academic Anxiety Inventory with a Bilingual d/Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing Sample,” based on their recent research. Several members of that same PEN team, plus Quandt, and Dr. Alicia Wooten, Associate Professor of Biology, will have a poster on “Leveraging Visuospatial ASL for Better Conceptual Understanding in STEM Education.”

Dr. Karen Garrido-Nag, Director of the Developmental Neurolinguistics and Cognition Lab, Dr. Daniel Koo, Director of the School of Human Services and Sciences, and Dr. Lawrence Pick, Director of Clinical Training for the Psychology Program, have a poster on their study looking at “The Neurophysiology of Visual Rhyme Data in Deaf Undergraduate Readers.”

Also look out for several Gallaudet posters that are part of the Sandbox Series, which focus on planned work or work in progress. PEN graduate student Melody Schwenk is offering a peek into her research on “The influence of American Sign Language on neural dynamics and spatial cognition,” PEN graduate student Joseph Palagano explores “The role of predictive processing in American Sign Language fingerspelling,” and PEN postdoctoral fellow Dr. Meghan McGarry is asking, “How do iconicity and embodied cognition interact during sign processing?”

Bringing Protactile into the conversation

This year marks the first time anything on Protactile will be presented at the SNL conference. Dr. Deanna Gagne, Associate Professor of Linguistics, and Hayley Broadway — the Co-Principal Investigators of PTKids — have a Sandbox Series poster, “Developing a Tactile Habituation Task for DeafBlind Children Using Wearable Haptics.” As part of their project exploring what happens when DeafBlind adults introduce Protactile to DeafBlind children, they are working with a team from St. Louis University to create a device that can assess perception and cognition in these children. The idea is to deliver patterns of vibrations, and then use a heart rate monitor to determine the effect of the stimulation.

Gagne is looking forward to bringing attention to another way that humans process language. “For a long time, research with deaf populations has worked to create its roots,” says Gagne, who is excited that this work is now getting the recognition it deserves. “It’s nice to see that contributing more to general knowledge.”

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For the full schedule of events for the SNL 2025 conference, click here.