Séminaire Mind Your Language - Genetics of language

Presentation:

I am a CNRS senior research scientist at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Department of Cognitive Studies, Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, within which I head the "Cognitive development and pathology" team.
My research team investigates individual differences in cognitive development and in school achievement, their cognitive and neural basis, and the underlying genetic and environmental factors.
We study both normal and pathological variations in cognitive development, with a particular expertise on developmental dyslexia, and a special interest in sex differences.
Within development, we are particularly interested in language, literacy and numeracy, general intelligence, and psychiatric disorders.
We employ experimental methods as well as an epidemiological approach relying on birth cohorts and large cognitive, educational and biological databases.

Abstract:

It has long been hypothesised that the human faculty to acquire a language is in some way encoded in our DNA. However, only recently has genetic evidence been available to begin to substantiate the presumed genetic basis of language. We will review data from statistical and molecular genetic studies showing associations between gene variants and language disorders (in particular developmental dyslexia), and we will further reflect on how the human genome builds a brain that can learn a language.