Billingual before language | Europa International School

Dear families,

We are pleased to invite you to the next EISB TALK on Thursday 25th March.

On this occasion we will welcome Núria Sebastián, who will give a talk on “Bilingües antes del lenguaje”, for all our EISB community.

Núria Sebastián is Professor of Psychology at Pompeu Fabra University and has a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Barcelona.

She is a pioneer in research into bilingual learning in babies. She currently conducts her research as director of the Speech Acquisition and Perception Group (SAP) at the Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC) at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She has directed the PhD School at UPF since July 2013**.

We recommend that you participate in this presentation, which on this occasion will be in Spanish, in order to discover the scientific evidence of how the brain works in bilingual babies and children. The speaker will explain why the younger a child is exposed to more than one language the better. And she will also talk about the importance of a context of natural communication for language acquisition.

There will be time allotted for questions, on both scientific and practical issues, that can be asked in Spanish, Catalan or English.

We look forward to seeing you all via ZOOM next Thursday 25th from 19h to 20h. This is the link to request access: http://bit.ly/EISBtalksNuria

Thank you and best regards,

Lyn McBride

Infant Coordinator

European International School of Barcelona

**More about Núria Sebastián: She obtained her PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of Barcelona. After a postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute and the CNRS, she has been a visiting researcher at several research centres such as the IRCS at the University of Pennsylvania, the ICN at University College London and the University of Chicago. She was internationally recognised with the James S. McDonnell Foundation Award (Bridging Mind, Brain and Behavior programme) in 2001 and gave the prestigious Nijmegen Lectures in 2005. In 2009 and 2014 she was awarded the ICREA Academia prize and in 2012 the Narcís Monturiol medal in recognition of her scientific contribution. In 2016, she was elected Corresponding Fellow of The British Academy, the UK’s leading national institution in the humanities and social sciences. She was Vice-President of the European Research Council in 2014, 2015 and 2016.

She was the coordinator of the CONSOLIDER BRAINGLOT project (2007-2013), which investigates bilingualism and cognitive neuroscience and consists of six interdisciplinary research groups. One of Professor Núria Sebastián’s current projects is the ERC Advanced Grant ‘UnderControl’ project, which investigates the relationship between attention and language development.

She is the author of more than 100 publications in international journals (including Science, PNAS, The Journal of Neuroscience, among others). Currently she is associate editor of Developmental Science (2005-) and Language Learning and Development (2013-). She is also editor of the Cognitive Neuroscience Series of Language Learning and a member of numerous editorial boards, including Bilingualism, Language and Cognition and Trends in Neuroscience and Education.