Mathilde Fort

Dr. Mathilde Fort is an Associate Professor (Maître de conférences) at Université Grenoble Alpes, with dual affiliation at Université Lyon 1. She teaches primary school teachers at the Institut National Supérieur du Professorat et de l'Education (INSPE) and conducts research at the Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition (LPNC) and the Centre de Recherches de Neurosciences de Lyon (CRNL).

Education:

• Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (2024): ATTENTION BOUBA! Rôles des mécanismes attentionnels et du symbolisme sonore dans l'acquisition précoce du langage
• PhD in Cognitive Psychology (2011): L'accès au lexique dans la perception visuelle et audiovisuelle de la parole
• Master 2 Research in Cognitive Sciences (2008)
• Master 1 in Cognitive Psychology (2007)
• Licence in Psychology (2006)

Dr. Fort's research focuses on developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, with particular emphasis on audiovisual language perception and acquisition in infants. Her work explores how infants process talking faces, attention mechanisms, cross-modal correspondences, intuitive physics, the bouba-kiki effect, and infant face recognition. She investigates how these cognitive processes contribute to early language development and how they might differ in bilingual versus monolingual infants. Her research has significant implications for understanding language acquisition in educational contexts and for children with developmental differences.

Her publication record reveals consistent themes in infant cognition research, particularly examining how infants use visual information from talking faces to support language acquisition. A significant thread in her work explores the bouba-kiki effect and sound symbolism in early development. Her recent research increasingly addresses real-world implications, such as the effects of face masks on infant social cognition during the pandemic, demonstrating both theoretical and practical relevance of her work.

Scientific Awards:

• Prix du jeune chercheur de la fondation Christian Benoît (2015)
• Bourse post-doctorale NeuroCog (2018)
• Bourse SFR Santé Société (2019-2020)
• Bourse de Master 2 (2020)

Dr. Fort actively supervises approximately 20 Master's students annually and serves on numerous thesis committees. She leads significant research projects including the ANR JCJC CONTROLEARN (2022-2025, 260k€) as Principal Investigator, and co-leads the BabyLab Grenoble and Pupil-lab Grenoble research platforms, securing substantial funding from ANR, CNRS, and the Fondation de France.

As co-coordinator of the BabyLab Grenoble since 2022 and the Pupil-lab Grenoble since 2020, Dr. Fort oversees cutting-edge research on infant development using eye-tracking and other methodologies to study early language acquisition, face processing, and cognitive development in typically developing infants and those with atypical development. Her work bridges fundamental research with practical applications in education and child development.