معرفی
Judit Gervain is a Full Professor at the Department of Developmental and Social Psychology at the University of Padua, Italy, and a CNRS Senior Research Scientist (Directeur de Recherche) at the Integartive Neuroscience and Cognition Center (CNRS & Université Paris Descartes), Paris, France. Her research focuses on early speech perception, language acquisition in monolingual and bilingual infants, and the neural mechanisms underlying language learning. She pioneered studies on newborn speech perception using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), revealing prenatal influences on perceptual abilities and the emergence of grammatical structures in preverbal infants.
Education: PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience (2002, SISSA, Trieste), postdoctoral research at the University of British Columbia (2007–2009), and CNRS researcher since 2009. She has authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles in journals like Science Advances, Nature Communications, and Developmental Science.
Research Interests: Infant language processing, bilingualism, neuroimaging techniques (fNIRS), and comparing infant learning trajectories to artificial intelligence systems. Her work bridges developmental psychology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics, emphasizing the role of innate biases and environmental input in language acquisition.
Her recent studies explore how infants’ learning mechanisms differ from Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on input requirements, critical periods, and the role of multimodal integration. She also investigates the impact of prenatal auditory experience on neonatal speech perception and the neural foundations of linguistic structure detection.
Labs/Teams: Affiliated with the CNRS’s Integartive Neuroscience and Cognition Center and the University of Padua’s developmental psychology group. Serves as associate editor for Developmental Science and Neurophotonics.
