Elissa Lee Newport is a professor of neurology and director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University.
In July 2012, she joined the faculty at Georgetown University where she became the founding director of the newly established Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery.
In 2017, Newport and eight other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the University of Rochester for its handling of sexual misconduct complaints against another professor.
[13] With Richard N. Aslin and Jenny Saffran,[14] Newport introduced statistical learning to the study of natural language acquisition: the hypothesis that infants, young children, and adults acquire the structure of languages by computing the statistics of the co-occurrence of elements - which elements of the sound stream occur most frequently, and which elements occur consistently together or predictively - and using these statistics to find the words, phrases, and sentence structures of their languages.
In contrast, more competent adults will begin by trying to analyze more complexity from the start and will have difficulty finding the best analyses.
Newport has been recognized by a number of organizations for the impact of her theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of language acquisition.