Jacques Mehler is an influential cognitive psychologist specializing in language acquisition.
Education
Mehler studied chemistry at Universidad de Buenos Aires from 1948 to 1951. After that, he went to Oxford University and University College of London where he obtain his Bachelor of Science degree. From 1961 to 1964, he studied at, at the time of the cognitive revolution, where he worked with George A. Miller and obtain a Doctor of Philosophy. in Psychology.
Career
In Psychology. Mehler is Emeritus at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he directed the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP) he is currently the head of the Language, Cognition and Development lab at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste (Italy). He was editor in chief of the journal Cognition until 2007. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2009) describes the research conducted by Agnes Melinda Kovacs and Jacques Mehler on the cognitive gains in seven-month-old bilingual infants.
In three eye-tracking studies, Kovacs and Mehler found that infants, reared with two languages from birth, display improved cognitive control abilities compared with matched monolinguals.
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.