The 2023 Dr. Donald G. Doehring Memorial Lecture

February 13, 5 to 7 pm

Leacock 232*

855 Sherbrooke St. W.

Janet Werker, Ph.D.

University Killam Professor and Canada Research Chair

Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia.

" Perceptual foundations of language acquisition: Multisensory Influences”

Infants are born with 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, infant auditory speech perception is influenced by temporal and structural relations between heard, seen, and felt speech - all without prior specific experience. In this talk, I will explore the multisensory speech perception capabilities of the very young human infant, and how these change across development and initial steps in language acquisition. I will end by suggesting that speech perception is multisensory from very early in development, including not only acoustic, but also visual and oral-motor information, and present a framework for how such multimodal representations may first be established.

Janet F. Werker, O.C., FRSC, is a developmental psychologist recognized for her work on infant speech perception and the foundations of language acquisition - particularly for examining the effects of experience on speech perception, the multisensory nature of speech perception, and the relationship between speech perception and word learning. Werker completed her PhD in UBC, followed by a job at Dalhousie University before she returned to UBC. Her many awards include the Killam prize in the Social Sciences and membership in the U.S. National Academy of Science. She is a founder and co-director of the UBC Language Sciences Institute.

*This talk will be given in person. Should the pandemic situation change such that in-person delivery is not advisable, an updated announcement will be sent out with a zoom-link