Janet F. Werker studies the perceptual and conceptual foundations of language acquisition, beginning in infancy. Using behavioral and neuroimaging approaches, she studies how growing up in different language/cultural communities (or bilingual) impacts speech perception, word learning, and syntactic processing. While her work has been primarily with infants and toddlers, she is keen to work with the SSHRC PG group to extend it to older children and to relate it to reading. Janet co-founded the UBC Language Sciences Initiative in 2015.