Judit Gervain

This talk will present a series of NIRS and EEG experiments with newborn infants who how experience with speech heard in the womb already shapes the neural circuitry dedicated to speech and language processing. Prenatal experience consists mainly of prosody, as the womb acts as a low-pass filter, suppressing individual speech sounds. The talk argues that this early prosodic experience lays the foundations of subsequent language acquisition, as it helps infants chuck the speech stream into units that are relevant for the acquisition of syntax and the lexicon.

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.