Myrna Lee Gopnik (born 1935) is a

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

linguist. She is a

Professor Emerita ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Univer ...

. She is known for her research on the

KE family The KE family is a medical name designated for a British family, about half of whom exhibit a severe speech disorder called developmental verbal dyspraxia. It is the first family with speech disorder to be investigated using genetic analyses, by wh ...

, an English family with several members affected by

specific language impairment Specific language impairment (SLI) (the term developmental language disorder is preferred by some) is diagnosed when a child's language does not develop normally and the difficulties cannot be accounted for by generally slow development, physical ...

. Gopnik is generally credited with an important early evaluation of the

, and with making this family known to the wider scientific community. Subsequent research by Anthony Monaco,

Simon Fisher Simon E. Fisher (born 1970) is a British geneticist and neuroscientist who has pioneered research into the genetic basis of human speech and language. He is a director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Professor of language a ...

and colleagues at Oxford University identified a mutation in the

FOXP2 Forkhead box protein P2 (FOXP2) is a protein that, in humans, is encoded by the ''FOXP2'' gene. FOXP2 is a member of the forkhead box family of transcription factors, proteins that regulate gene expression by binding to DNA. It is expressed ...

gene as a cause of the KE family's disorder (see: A forkhead-domain gene is mutated in a severe speech and language disorder.Lai CS, Fisher SE, Hurst JA, Vargha-Khadem F, Monaco AP. ''Nature''. 2001 vol. 413(6855):pp. 519–23.) Gopnik's son

Adam Adam; el, Ἀδάμ, Adám; la, Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, ''adam'' is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as " ...

is a well-known novelist and writer for the

New Yorker New Yorker or ''variant'' primarily refers to: * A resident of the State of New York ** Demographics of New York (state) * A resident of New York City ** List of people from New York City * ''The New Yorker'', a magazine founded in 1925 * '' The ...

, her son Blake has a doctorate from University of Oxford and is an art critic, and her daughter Alison is a

developmental psychology Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult developme ...

professor at

UC-Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...

Publications

* ''Linguistic structures in scientific texts'', 1968 * ''Semiotic approaches to theories'', 1976 * ''The inheritance and innateness of grammars'', 1997

References

1935 births Living people Jewish Canadian scientists Linguists from Canada Canadian psychologists Canadian women psychologists McGill University faculty Place of birth missing (living people) Women linguists {{canada-linguist-stub