Deanna Gagne

I received my PhD from the University of Connecticut in Developmental Psychology with certificates in the Neurobiology of Language and the Cognitive Sciences.  My research focuses on the ways in which children acquire or develop language and the ways that varying language experiences relates to cognition.  This could be individually: the way that children learn and influence the language they are learning, or, in the case of homesigning children, the ways in which they create language without having had a language model.  This also could be in a language community: the ways in which adults as language models and children as peer models influence the language that a child in that context learns the language.  I work primarily in sign environments, considering the varying ways in which deaf or hearing children learn and develop a sign language.

As a natively-exposed trilingual (ASL, Spanish, and English), I am interested in the ways that children acquire more than one language and how the amount and type of exposure to any one language may influence its acquisition.  

I do this by studying the language of Deaf and hearing individuals in the United States, Nicaragua and other countries whose sign languages may have recently emerged or are still emerging. My methodologies include behavioral tasks, linguistic elicitation, and eye tracking as a measure of implicit processing.