Speaker
Description
The brain undergoes radical changes during the first years of life, which lay the foundations for many essential perceptual and cognitive abilities, such as language use or face perception. Imaging these neural changes is thus highly relevant, but not easy, as infants are challenging research participants. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a relatively new brain imaging technique, which is quickly becoming the method of choice for many developmental applications due to its infant-friendly use, low cost, motion tolerance and wearability. This talk will describe how NIRS can be used to investigate newborns and young infants’ speech perception and language development abilities, illustrating technological, methodological and practical challenges and breakthroughs. I will show how NIRS can be used with typically and atypically developing infants in the lab, at the bedside and in home settings.
Judit Gervain is a Full Professor of Developmental Psychology, University of Padua, Italy and a Senior Research Scientist, CNRS, France. Her research focuses early speech perception and language acquisition in typically and atypically developing infants. Her work is published in leading journals, such as Science Advances, Nature Communications, PNAS, Current Biology. She is an associate editor at Developmental Science, Annual Reviews of Developmental Psychology and Neurophotonics. Her work has been funded by the ERC, the Human Frontiers Science Program, as well as French and Italian national funding agencies. Since 2024, she has been serving as the President elect of the International Society for Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.
