Judit Gervain is a psychologist, neurolinguist and acquisitionist who is professor of developmental psychology at the University of Padua.[1][2]
Gervain studied for a triple MA at the University of Szeged, Hungary: in English Language and Literature, French Language and Literature (1996–2002) and Theoretical Linguistics (1998–2003). She received her PhD from the International School for Advanced StudiesinTrieste, Italy, in 2007.[3]
From 2007 to 2009 she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia. In 2009 she moved to the CNRS to take up a position as researcher, where she was promoted to director of research in 2017.[1] She is currently full professor in the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation at the University of Padua.[2]
In 2018 Gervain received a Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council for her project BabyRhythm.[4] In the same year she was elected Member of the Academia Europaea.[1]
Gervain's research is interdisciplinary, spanning linguistics, psychology and developmental cognitive neuroscience. She has worked on information-theoretic approaches to speech, speech perception, the perceptual and learning abilities of newborns, and early language acquisition.[1] The optical brain-monitoring technique functional near-infrared spectroscopy has been a central method in her work.[5] Her ERC project BabyRhythm (2018–2023) dealt with how speech prosody lays the foundations for language acquisition in infants, both before and after birth.[4]