Agnes Villwock

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | HU Berlin · Department of Rehabilitation Sciences

Deaf bilinguals for whom American Sign Language (ASL) is the first language and English is the second language judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs in English. Critically, a subset of both the semantically related and unrelated word pairs were selected such that the translations of the two English words also had related forms in ASL. Word...

Bilinguals, both hearing and deaf, activate multiple languages simultaneously even in contexts that require only one language. To date, the point in development at which bilingual signers experience cross-language activation of a signed and a spoken language remains unknown. We investigated the processing of written words by ASL-English bilingual d...

Areas within the left-lateralized neural network for language have been found to be sensitive to syntactic complexity in spoken and written language. Previous research has revealed that these areas are active for sign language as well, but whether these areas are specifically responsive to syntactic complexity in sign language independent of lexica...

The impact of congenital deafness on the development of vision has been investigated to a considerable degree. However, whether multisensory processing is affected by auditory deprivation has often remained largely overlooked. To fill this gap, we investigated the consequences of a profound auditory deprivation from birth on visuo-tactile processin...

How do deaf and deafblind individuals process touch? This question offers a unique model to understand the prospects and constraints of neural plasticity. Our brain constantly receives and processes signals from the environment and combines them into the most reliable information content. The nervous system adapts its functional and structural orga...

How do deaf and deafblind individuals process touch? This question offers a unique model to understand the prospects and constraints of neural plasticity. Our brain constantly receives and processes signals from the environment and combines them into the most reliable information content. The nervous system adapts its functional and structural orga...

Taube und hörende mehrsprachi-ge Personen aktivieren nie nur eine Sprache, sondern die vorhandenen Sprachen sind simultan aktiv. Für taube bimodal-bilinguale Personen konnte eine solche Ko-Aktivierung in mehreren Studien mit erwachsenen Proband*innen und für ver-schiedene Sprachen gezeigt werden. Dabei zeigt sich ein robuster Ko-Aktivierungseffekt,...

Christliche Institutionen spielten lange eine bedeutende Rolle in der Schulbildung. Über Jahrhunderte hinweg hatten insbesondere Klöster hohen gesellschaftlichen Einfluss und eine wichtige kulturelle Funktion in Europa. Häufig waren sie die einzigen Orte, an denen Bildung und Wissenschaft stattfand. In Bezug auf Gehörlosenbildung herrschte lange di...

In humans, face-processing relies on a network of brain regions predominantly in the right occipito-temporal cortex. We tested congenitally deaf (CD) signers and matched hearing controls (HC) to investigate the experience dependence of the cortical organization of face processing. Specifically, we used EEG frequency-tagging to evaluate: (1) Face-Ob...

Emotions are commonly recognized by combining auditory and visual signals (i.e., vocal and facial expressions). Yet it is unknown whether the ability to link emotional signals across modalities depends on early experience with audio-visual stimuli. In the present study, we investigated the role of auditory experience at different stages of developm...

This study addressed visualword recognition in deaf bilinguals who are proficient inGerman Sign Language (DGS) and German. The study specifically investigated whether DGS signs are activated during a monolingual German word recognition task despite the lack of similarity in German orthographic representations and DGS phonological representations. D...

Several studies conducted in mammals and humans have shown that multisensory processing may be impaired following congenital sensory loss and in particular if no experience is achieved within specific early developmental time windows known as sensitive periods. In this study we investigated whether basic multisensory abilities are impaired in heari...