The process of acquiring a language starts both automatically and extremely early – before birth, during the last trimester.
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This is the message that will be delivered by the guest speaker at the next meeting of the Royal Society of NSW Southern Highland branch. The lecture topic is Language in the first year of life – Babies are working even harder than we thought.
Professor Anne Cutler FRS is a research professor at the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University and Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen.
She will talk about her research, which has discovered that early language in children when - adopted internationally – can be subconsciously retained even when they can no longer remember the learning experience, so adopted babies can remember their birth language findings.
Her key message is that babies are born without predisposition to a particular language; whatever language they hear, that is the language they acquire. In other words, the processes in the baby brain must be language-universal.
Prof Cutler’s work has been honoured with the Spinoza Prize of the Dutch Research Council and the ISCA Medal of the International Speech Communication Association, and she is an elected member of scientific academies in Europe, the US and Australia.
The Royal Society presentation will be held at the Mittagong RSL Club on April 12 from 6.30pm. Doors will be open from 6pm.
The cost to attend the lecture is $10 for non-members, $5 for members and teachers and students are free. A dinner with the lecturer will be held at the club following the presentation.