About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about the acquisition and development of language, focusing in particular on: (i) the role of Noam Chomsky in the debates around language acquisition; (ii) evidence that babies can differentiate any sound, irrespective of language, from a very young age, prior to acquiring their own language; (iii) the loss of the ability, in later life, to differentiate between sounds which don’t appear in our learned language(s); (iv) the biological process of pruning during brain specialisation; (v) this specialisation process as an explanation for why being bilingual at a young age makes learning further languages later in life easier; (vi) research findings that babies whose parents have professional job roles learn more words than babies whose parents have jobs which don’t require as much varied language usage; (vii) Hart and Risley’s 1995 book, which explored key differences in American children’s experiences, including parental speech exposure.

About the lecturer

Dr Ashok Jansari is a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Dr Jansari’s research interests include memory disorders, prosopagnosia, executive functions, and synaesthesia. Dr Jansari is most famous for his research into prosopagnosia, having made numerous TV appearances, including on BBC1’s The One Show, as well as hosting his own ‘Neuro Talk’ YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/c/DrAshokJansariNeuroTalk/featured

Some of Dr Jansari's recent publications include 'Acquired synaesthesia following 2C-B use' (2019), 'Using virtual reality to investigate multitasking ability in individuals with frontal lobe lesions' (2019), and 'Identification from CCTV: Assessing police super-recogniser ability to spot faces in a crown and susceptibility to change blindness' (2018).