Rachel Mayberry

Rachel Mayberry's Academic Profile

Rachel I. Mayberry is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where she holds affiliations with the Center for Research on Language, Cognitive Science Program, and the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA). She holds a Ph.D. from McGill University, M.Sc. from Washington University, and B.A. from Drake University. Her work focuses on the critical period for language acquisition through sign language and deafness studies.

Her research integrates psycholinguistic and neuroimaging methods to explore how delayed language exposure impacts syntactic processing, brain development, and reading proficiency in deaf individuals. Key areas include neurolinguistic processing differences between early and late first-language learners of ASL, the role of modality in syntactic comprehension, and the relationship between gesture and language development.

Mayberry teaches courses such as Sign Language and Its Culture (Lign 7), Child Language Acquisition (Lign 171), and Biology and Environment in Language Acquisition (Lign 282). She has received grants from NIH, the Kavli Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Her work has been published in high-impact journals like Developmental Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Brain and Language.

Notable contributions include demonstrating that critical period effects are stronger for first-language acquisition than second-language learning, and revealing how early language deprivation alters neural language pathways in adulthood. Her lab collaborates with institutions like the Salk Institute and UCSD's Neuroscience Program to bridge cognitive science and linguistics.