Makeba Wilbourn

Makeba Wilbourn is Associate Professor of the Practice in Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. Her research examines cognitive-language development intersections, focusing on infants' word learning foundations, bilingualism's cognitive effects, and gesture's role in language acquisition.

Key research areas: 1) Cognition's influence on early language development, particularly how infants' perceptual skills scaffold word learning; 2) Language's impact on cognition in monolingual/bilingual children; 3) Gesture's relationship to language development across socio-cultural contexts. Recent publications investigate racial bias development in emotion reasoning (2022), infants' label-to-face mapping (2021), and pointing gestures in learning (2019).

Her work employs experimental methods with infants and children to understand how linguistic experiences (bilingualism) and non-verbal communication (gestures) shape cognitive processes across development.