Lunch Hour Lecture | How do our brains learn languages?

In this lecture, Dr. Natalia V. Parker will examine language learning through the eyes of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. About the lecture: How do our brains learn languages? In this lecture, Dr. Natalia V. Parker 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. Originally streamed on 16 October 2025.