Lunch Hour Lecture | How do our brains learn languages?

About the lecture:

How do our brains learn languages?

In this lecture, Dr. Natalia V. Parker from SSEES will examine language learning through the eyes of cognitive psychology. She will talk about how our brains encode language information, store it and, then, retrieve it, about different types of memory we use, and how some recent findings in neuroscience, psychology, and pedagogy could be applied to real learning situations. Most importantly, Natalia will illustrate how our cognitive processing could be optimised, and suggest strategies of how to make language learning more effective.

UCL's popular public Lunch Hour Lecture series has been running at UCL since 1942, and showcases the exceptional research work being undertaken across UCL. Lectures are free and open to all and since 2020 have been held online.

About the speaker:

Born and first educated in Russia, Natalia completed her MA in Applied Linguistics in 2016. She secured AHRC funding for her PhD, which she was awarded in 2022. Her research synthesizes recent findings in psycholinguistics, Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and language pedagogy, investigating ways of optimizing learners’ cognitive processing. Her textbook based on her research, was published by Routledge in 2020. Natalia conducted a Knowledge Exchange project, organizing a series of round tables on how to learn languages more effectively. She now teaches Russian at SSEES and regularly presents at international conferences, such as EuroSLA (European Second Language Association) and BASEES (the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies).

About the chair:

Dr. Vita Kogan is a psycholinguist with a research focus on learner psychology, language cognition, and the acquisition of phonetics and phonology across languages and throughout the lifespan. They are also a passionate educator, continuously experimenting with innovative pedagogical approaches such as gamified learning, real-life project-based teaching, and service learning. Most of their research is based at the University of Lisbon, where they hold several research grants. Previously, Dr. Kogan worked as a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Kent and Queen Mary University of London. Currently, they serve on the advisory board of the Individual Differences in Language Education journal and on the review board of the Ludic Language Pedagogy journal.