Chiara Santolin

Chiara Santolin is a Researcher at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), affiliated with the Speech Acquisition and Perception (SAP) Group since October 2017. She holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Padova (2016) and an M.Sc. in Experimental Psychology & Cognitive Science (Summa cum Laude, 2013), also from Padova. She conducted postdoctoral training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA, 2016-2017).

• Education:
• Ph.D., Psychology, University of Padova (2016)
• M.Sc., Experimental Psychology & Cognitive Science, University of Padova (2013)

Her research explores the mechanisms underlying language acquisition, investigating whether these processes are unique to language or shared across domains. She employs interdisciplinary approaches, combining studies with human infants and animal models (e.g., domestic chicks) to examine statistical learning, syntactic structures, and categorization. Recent work includes analyzing infants’ preferences for speech prosody, constraints on non-linguistic grammar learning, and cross-species comparisons of visual and auditory learning.

Collaborators include Jenny Saffran (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Giorgio Vallortigara (University of Trento), and researchers at the University of Padova. She actively participates in international conferences, presenting findings on topics like bilingual acquisition and infant cognitive development.

Chiara’s research bridges developmental psychology, cognitive science, and comparative biology, aiming to uncover universal learning principles and their evolutionary foundations.