Perceptual beginnings to first language acquisition: Critical periods and multisensory influences
Description
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://mit.zoom.us/j/91229980634
At birth, infants already have in place a number of perceptual sensitivities that predispose them to attend to human speech and talking human faces and to represent core properties of each. Moreover, as early as the have been tested, infants can detect structural relations between heard, seen, and felt speech - all without prior specific experience. Coupled with powerful learning capabilities, these initial capacities allow infants to rapidly become expert perceivers, and ultimately users of their native language. In this talk, I will explore the multisensory speech perception capabilities of the very young human infant, how these change across development and learning to map on to the characteristics of the native language (languages in the case of the bilingual infants), all within a framework of how cascading critical periods might act to gate and/or amplify experience. The theoretical and applied implications of this work will be discussed.
Speaker Bio
Janet F. Werker, University Killam Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Psychology at UBC is a developmental psychologist recognized for her work on infant speech perception and the foundations of language acquisition. She is known particularly for her work examining the effects of experience on speech perception, the multisensory nature of speech perception, and the relationship between speech perception development and word learning. Werker completed her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, with a major in psychology. After moving to Canada, she attended graduate school at the University of British Columbia (UBC), receiving her PhD in 1982. Her first academic position was in Psychology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and she returned to UBC as a faculty member in 1986. A fellow of AAAS, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the National Academy of Science, she is a previous fellow and now advisor to the Canadian Institutes for Advanced Research, and a founder and co-director of the UBC Language Sciences Initiative. At UBC, she runs the Infant Studies Centre, where infants and their parents participate in research studies