Janet Werker

Janet Werker is a researcher in the field of developmental psychology. She researches the foundations of monolingual and bilingual infant language acquisition in infants at the University of British Columbia's Infant Studies Centre. Werker received her Ph.D. in psychology at the University of British Columbia (1982). She is a Canada Research Chair professor at the University of British Columbia and is the recipient of the 2015 SSHRC Gold Medal.

Research

Werker uses both behavioural and neuroimaging tasks to identify maturational milestones that make it possible for children to begin the process of language acquisition. She has investigated how maternal depression and treatment for it can affect timing of language development in children.

Directions in future research include identifying whether expressions of ethnicity influence bilingual children's ability to keep their two languages distinct, and how watching talking faces, in addition to hearing speech, influences acquisition.

Biography

Werker completed her BA in psychology and social relations at Harvard University in 1976. She then went to the University of British Columbia for graduate work under Richard Tees. She attributes her interest in language acquisition to living in Vancouver, where most children grow up in bilingual households.

Werker has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Association for Psychological Science.

Selected publications

• J.F. Werker and T.K. Hensch, "Critical Periods in Speech Perception: New Directions," Annu. Rev. Psych., vol. 66, pp. 173–196, 2015.
• P. Kandhadai et al, "Culture as a binder for bilingual acquisition," Trends Neurosci. Educ., vol. 3, pp. 24–7, 2014.
• J. Gervain and J.F. Werker, "Prosody cues word order in 7-month-old bilingual infants," Nature Commun., vol. 4, 2013.
• W.M. Weikum et al, "Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception," PNAS, vol. 109, no. 2, pp. 17221–7, Oct. 2012.