Our research

Our research focuses on the study of infant speech perception abilities, attention development and early language acquisition processes, both in normally developing infants (monolingual and bilingual) and in infants at risk for language and neurocognitive disorders.

Our methodological approach is mainly behavioral, with procedures that rely on attention, visual fixation and orientation latency measures. We also record brain activity (EEG/ERP) in our pre-school children’s studies.

Some of the specific research lines are the following: early language differentiation abilities, native language recognition, phonetic categorization of native and non-native speech sounds, the beginnings of word segmentation, phonological encoding and word recognition processes.

If your child is up to 18 months of age or you know someone with a baby in this age range, we would like to invite you to participate in our language development studies.

The studies are conducted at our lab located at the research facilities of SJD Barcelona Children’s Hospital and the sessions last about 30 minutes. For studies with infants, the participant will sit on the parent’s lap or close to the parent at all times. The tasks consist in watching pictures or movies on a television monitor while listening to words or sounds. The participant is videotaped and the information is analyzed at a later time.

PARTICIPA