Judit Gervain

Senior Research Scientist – CNRS

LouiseKirsch

I work on early speech perception and language acquisition. I am most interested in finding out how babies break into language, especially grammar, so I work mostly with very young infants from birth to the first years of life. I use behavioral methods, optical brain imaging (near-infrared spectroscopy) and electrophysiological measures to understand language acquisition.

Selected Publications

– Abboub, N., Nazzi, Th., Gervain, J. 2016. “Prosodic grouping at birth”. Brain and Language. 162: 46-59.

– Gervain, J., Werker, J. F., Black, A., Geffen, M. N. 2016. “The neural correlates of processing scale-invariant environmental sounds at birth”. NeuroImage. 133:144-150.

-Guevara Erra, R., Gervain, J. 2016. “The Efficient Coding of Speech: Cross-Linguistic Differences”. PLoS One. 11(2):e0148861.

– Gervain, J. 2015. “Plasticity in early language acquisition: The effects of prenatal and early childhood experience”. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 35: 13-20.

– Gervain, J. & J. Werker. 2013. “Tuned to Grammar: Prosody Cues Word Order in Bilingual Infants.” Nature Communications, 4:1490.

– Gervain, J., Macagno, F., Cogoi, S., Peña, M. & Mehler, J. 2008. “The neonate brain extracts speech structure”. PNAS, 105(37): 14222-14227.