PredictAble: Understanding and predicting developmental language abilities and in multilingual Europe is a project being carried out at UPF and belongs to the Initial Training Network ITN, European Joint Doctorates of the European Union's Marie Curie
programme.  

The project involves the participation of the Center for Brain and Cognition of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) and the principal investigators and doctoral supervisors are Núria Sebastián-Gallés, head of the Speech Acquisition & Perception Group (SAP) and Luca Bonatti, ICREA researcher and director of the Reasoning and Infant Cognition Research Group (RICO).

The network studies the underlying cognitive mechanisms in typical and atypical development of spoken and written language from a crosscutting linguistic viewpoint, with a unique and innovative state-of-the-art combination of approaches and techniques for the study of monolingual and bilingual children.

UPF is part of a consortium that comprises the University of Potsdam and NIRx Medizintechnik GmbH (Berlin, Germany), the CNRS-Paris Descartes University (France) and the University of Jyväskylä (Finland).

Three projects about multilingualism, social development and language acquisition in infants

Within the framework of the European Joint Doctorates of the Marie Curie programme of the European Union, the DTIC's Center for Brain and Cognition offers three positions for which applications may be made from early September 2015.

Núria Sebastián-Gallés will direct the research, "Multilingual exposure and development of early phonology" which is based on the fact that there is growing evidence that babies know various words at 6 months of age, before the phonetic categories have been acquired. The project aims to explore how the overlap at the lexical level between bilinguals' two languages interplays in the establishment of the phonetic categories. The investigation will focus on children between 6 and 24 months old. Their behaviour will be evaluated and an electroencephalogram will be used to track their eyes. This project will be developed in collaboration with the Paris Descartes University.

Supervised by Núria Sebastián-Gallés and in collaboration with Agnes Kovacs of the Central European University of Budapest (Hungary), the following project is proposed: "Multilingual exposure and integration of cross-modal information:

Consequences for language and social development". The aim of this project is to investigate the consequences of the differences reported in developmental patterns of attention to the areas of the eyes and mouth observed in infants who
grow up in multilingual environments.

Finally, the third project will be directed by Luca Bonatti, "Strategies acquisition of the first words in different populations language", whose aim is to study how exposure to different types of linguistic experiences, and/or being part of at-risk populations influences word learning and the acquisition of morphosyntax. The project will compare mono- and bilingual children exposed to languages with different phonological and syntactic properties using standard behavioural and eye-tracking methods. This position will be mainly based at Pompeu Fabra University with exchange visits to the University of Potsdam (Germany).

For further information about this announcement, open from this month of May, go to the website of the Speech Acquisition and Perception Research Group.