Anne Christophe

Anne Christophe is a Research Professor at the École Normale Supérieure – PSL University, where she serves as Deputy Director of Sciences since 2019. She directs the Laboratory of Cognitive Sciences and Psycholinguistics (LSCP UMR 8554) and is a member of Academia Europaea since 2016. Her career spans CNRS research since 1994 (Research Director since 2008), with leadership roles in academic governance and scientific councils.

• Doctorate in Cognitive Psychology, EHESS (1993)
• Accreditation to Supervise Research, Pierre and Marie Curie University (2006)
• Polytechnic School graduate (1989)

Her research focuses on language acquisition, particularly how infants use prosody and function words to parse syntactic structures and word meanings before age one. She investigates synergies between lexical and syntactic learning, resolving the "initialization problem" through early surface analysis of speech signals.

Selected article trends show sustained work on prosody-syntactic mapping (2015-2023), ERP studies in infants, computational modeling of acquisition strategies, and cross-linguistic comparisons. Her team's work spans French, Brazilian Portuguese, and English learners.

• Bronze Medal of CNRS (1998)
• Dagnan-Bouveret Prize (Academy of Moral and Political Sciences)
• CNRS Prime d'Excellence Scientifique (2012-2015) and PEDR (2016-2019)
• 2020 - Entire Work on Language Acquisition award

An active science popularizer, she contributed to over 10 documentaries and co-founded PSL's Master of Cognitive Sciences. She supervises PhD students like Kolberg (2020), Barbir (2019), and de Carvalho (2017), with international collaborations across 6 countries.