Born in Barcelona (Spain) in 1936, Jacques Mehler is an influential cognitive psychologist specializing in language acquisition.
Mehler studied in the 1960s at Harvard University, at the time of the cognitive revolution, where he worked with George A. Miller. 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. In 2001, Mehler was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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.[1]