Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl holds the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Learning and is Co-Director of the UW Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, Co-Director of the University of Washington’s NSF Science of Learning Center, and Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.   She is internationally recognized for her research on early language and bilingual brain development, for pioneering brain measures on young children, and studies that show how young children learn. 

The Mind of the Child: What Language Reveals about the Infant Brain and Learning

Some of the most revolutionary ideas in brain science are coming from the study of young children. I will focus on new discoveries about early learning in the arena of language. Infants are born with innate abilities that make them “citizens of the world,” and have the capacity to acquire any specific language, indeed multiple languages, easily. Two interacting factors account for children’s exquisite language learning skills: the child’s computational abilities and their social brains. New brain imaging results help explain the “critical period” for language learning. Modern neuroscience may reveal the mysteries and mechanisms of the interaction between biology and culture in human learning over the lifespan, and language serves as one of the best windows on this human process.

Co-sponsored by Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, School of Medicine, Bilingualism Matters, Center for Ideas and Society, CHASS, and the departments of Psychology, Hispanic Studies, Comparative Literature and Languages, and Anthropology