Sari Ylinen

Sari Ylinen is an Associate Professor (tenure track) in Welfare Sciences at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tampere. She also holds affiliations with the University of Helsinki as a docent in the Faculty of Medicine and supervisor in doctoral programs. Her research bridges cognitive neuroscience and clinical applications, focusing on language processing across diverse populations.

Her primary research explores:

• Neurocognitive mechanisms of language acquisition in infants and children
• Speech pathology in neurodegenerative disorders (especially Parkinson's disease)
• Cross-linguistic phonology and pronunciation assessment
• Predictive coding in auditory processing and learning

Recent publications show strong focus on developing quantitative voice analysis metrics for Parkinson's disease and investigating neural foundations of early language development. Her work frequently employs electrophysiological methods and computational linguistics approaches.

Awards include:

• Doctoral Thesis Award (2007, University of Helsinki)
• Young Investigator's Award (2007, Finnish Academy of Science)

She actively supervises doctoral candidates and has led multiple research projects including:

• TELL me: Technology-enhanced language learning with mobile devices (2016-2018)
• Predictive coding in language learning (2015-2018)
• Intelligent speech technology for game-based learning (2019)

She participates in the Cognitive Brain Research Unit and Learning and Plasticity research network.