How prenatal language exposure lays the foundations for language acquisition
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Biography
Judit Gervain is a Full Professor of Developmental Psychology, University of Padua, Italy and a Senior Research Scientist, CNRS, France. She obtained a PhD degree in Cognitive Neuroscience at SISSA, Trieste, Italy in 2007. After a post doc position at UBC, Vancouver, Canada, she took up a researcher position at the CNRS in Paris, France in 2009. In 2020, she moved to the University of Padua, Italy. Her research focuses early speech perception and language acquisition in typically and atypically developing infants. Her work is published in leading journals, such as Science Advances, Nature Communications, PNAS, Current Biology. She has served as Associate Editor for the journals Cognition, Neurophotonics and Developmental Science. Her work has been funded by the ERC, the Human Frontiers Science Program, as well as French and Italian national funding agencies. Since 2024, she has been serving as the President elect of the International Society for Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. In 2025, she was elected external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.