THE HUMAN INFANT BRAIN: A NEURAL ARCHITECTURE ABLE TO LEARN LANGUAGE 

Dr. Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz is a CNRS Scientific Director of the Developmental Neuroimaging Lab at Neurospin, a brain-imaging platform dedicated to the human brain in the suburbs of Paris. Originally qualified as a pediatrician, she has obtained her second Doctoral title in Life and Health Sciences at the Université Paris VI to then pursue her research career on the development of cognitive functions in infants and children using brain imaging techniques. Dr. Dehaene-Lambertz’s research goal is to meticulously study the brain’s initial structural and functional organization in order to understand how it may support later complex cognitive functions such as language, music, mathematics and more. Following the idea that evolution reconfigures primitive mechanisms to give rise to new functions, she examines the primitive brain function readily available to infants allowing them to process the world in which they evolve. In turn, she also investigates how the environment shapes the brain organization to reach a mature state. Her pioneering work studying language acquisition with new techniques as such high-density event-related potentials, functional resonance magnetic imaging or optical topography, has impacted the field of developmental neuroscience. Her work on infants’ brain, language acquisition and the neural signatures of consciousness has been published in the most prestigious journals such as Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Among others, she was awarded the “Grand Prix Scientifique” from the Foundation of France in 2015, and the Scientific Prize from the NRJ Foundation, Institute of France in 2016.