Two studies (Golestani et al., 2007; Wong et al., 2008) have reported a positive correlation between the ability to perceive foreign speech sounds and the volume of Heschl's gyrus (HG), the structure that houses the auditory ...

Air pollution is a suspected developmental neurotoxicant. Many schools are located in close proximity to busy roads, and traffic air pollution peaks when children are at school. We aimed to assess whether exposure of ...

The present study investigates the precursors of representations of phonemes in 4.5-month-olds. The emergence of phonemes has been mainly studied within the framework of perceptual narrowing, that is, infants tuning to ...

Infants can live in a monolingual or a bilingual environment from birth. While being exposed to one or two language does not influence when infants achieve the main language milestones it may require different adaptations ...

Our everyday life is plenty of social interactions, but there are still many unknowns about the mechanisms supporting them. The current dissertation aims to explore the neurocognitive processes that underlie interactions ...

The present dissertation aims at analyzing the interplay between initial acoustic biases and language exposure during acquisition of language in the first year of life. This is a critical period in development because it ...

Bilingual advantages in memory flexibility, indexed using a memory generalization task, have been reported (Brito & Barr,/n2012; 2014), and the present study examines what factors may influence memory performance. The first ...

Language discrimination is one of the core diferences between bilingual and monolingual language acquisition. Here, we investigate the earliest brain specialization induced by it. Following previous research, we hypothesize ...

Current speech perception models disagree over the role of speech production in speech perception. In the current study we aimed to characterise the relationship between speech perception and production by testing a large ...

Much of the information infants acquire they learn it by observing and interacting with others. However, not all individuals provide information that is functionally and/or culturally relevant. Infants’ capacity of identifying ...