What kind of studies do we do?

Find out more about our studies with newborns and infants!

Newborns

Language is a very complex and structured communicative system yet most humans find it surprisingly easy to acquire language. What mechanisms support this readiness for language learning early in life? This is one of the main research questions at the NeuroDevComp group, which we address by studying newborns a few hours after birth.

We use a technique called fNIRS (functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy) that allows to measure newborns’ spontaneous neural activity when listening to auditory inputs (e.g., continuous speech, individual syllables and words). We are currently conducting these studies at the Sant Joan de Deu Barcelona Children Hospital.

Infants

We are interested in learning how infants between 4 and 11 months old detect and process different speech features. It is known that young infants learn the rules and structures of their native language(s) very quickly and effortlessly.

Specifically, we are interested in learning how infants segment speech into small units, such as syllables. To address this question, we use several techniques:

• Behavioral: We measure the time infants look at a computer screen while listening to different types of speech sounds.
• Eye-tracker: We track infants’ gaze movements on the screen with great precision and also measure their pupil dilation when they hear speech sounds.
• fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy): We are interested in observing the activation of different brain areas when infants hear speech sounds.