Growing up amid a swirl of Russian, Hebrew, and English fed Elika Bergelson’s passion for language development.

Her parents had emigrated in the 1970s from the Soviet Union to Israel, where they began their family. Bergelson and her youngest sibling were born in the 1980s after the family settled in Columbus, Ohio. Even back then, she noticed generational differences around grammar, accents, and vocabularies that left her asking how the kids had outpaced the adults.

“What is it about language acquisition that makes younger minds — which are usually less good at everything — actually better at this particular process?” she remembered wondering.

Read the full article in the Harvard Gazette.