I am: Full professor and director of the Speech Acquisition & Perception group (SAP) at UPF. 

I am interested in:  language learning and processing, from a wide developmental perspective (infancy and adulthood). This general research goal crystalizes in the following open research lines:

- How infants manage to learn language, in particular, how within a few months they manage to learn the fundamental properties of the language they are exposed to and also the first words. Both in infants exposed to monolingual and to bilingual environments

- How first steps in language learning are shaped by the cognitive capacities of infants (attention, memory, etc).

- How social cues shape language acquisition and processing, in infants and in adult populations.

One discovery I am proud of:  There are two different discoveries I am proud of. One is discovering that the differences that adult individuals show in their capacity to learn foreign phoneme contrasts is paralleled in the neural signature when processing the native language (better neural response for native sounds correlates with better ability in perceive a foreign phoneme contrast). My second discovery relates to the differences that I have repeatedly reported in the way monolingual and bilingual infants acquire their language(s) of exposure. 

One thing I would like to discover next:  I would like to better understand the roots of the reported differences between monolingual and bilingual infants in language learning.

One article I would like you to read: Sebastian-Galles, N., Albareda-Castellot B., Weikum W. M., & Werker J.F. (2012).  A bilingual advantage in visual language discrimination in infancy. Psychological Science. 23, 994 - 999.