Janet Werker, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Psychology at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver , BC , Canada . She received her B.A. from Harvard University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of British Columbia . Her first faculty position was at Dalhousie University in Halifax , Nova Scotia . She has been back at UBC since 1985. Her primary research interest is in infant speech perception, with a focus on the perceptual biases infants have at birth, the learning mechanisms by which these change as a function of experience with one or another language, and how changing perceptual biases help bootstrap subsequent word learning and language acquisition. She is also interested in understanding infants growing up bilingual, and in extending her work on normal acquisition to infants at risk for language delay. Some of this work can be found in the following papers: (with Christopher Terrence Fennell, Kathleen Corcoran, and Christine Louise Stager) “Infants' Ability to Learn Phonetically Similar Words: Effects of Age and Vocabulary Size,” in Infancy; (with Jessica Maye and LouAnn Gerken) “Infant Sensitivity to Distributional Information Can Effect Phonetic Discrimination,” in Cognition; and (with Christopher Terrence Fennell) “From Listening to Sounds to Listening to Words: Early Steps in Word Learning,” in Weaving a Lexicon (MIT Press).

Janet Werker is a Forum Lecturer at the 2005 LSA Institute.