Olga KepinskaLanguage sciences
Laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS / Aix-Marseille Université
Olga Kepinska is a linguist and a cognitive neuroscientist, working as a CNRS Researcher at Laboratoire Parole et Langage at Aix-Marseille University. Previously, she was a post-doctoral researcher in the Brain and Language Lab of Prof. Narly Golestani at the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub and the Department of Behavioral & Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna, Austria. Prior to joining the Brain and Language Lab, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco and University of Connecticut in the US with Prof. Fumiko Hoeft. She got her PhD in Linguistics at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics in the Netherlands (2017), following a BA (University of Wrocław, Poland) and MA (Leiden University) degrees in Dutch Studies and an MA in Linguistics from Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.
Olga is interested in individual differences in (second) language acquisition from a neurocognitive perspective and the impact of complex environments on brain development and language skills. Her PhD focused on neural mechanisms and brain structures underlying successful foreign language learning. She looked into neural correlates of the analytical component of language aptitude using functional MRI, diffusion imaging and EEG. More recently, she was involved in a longitudinal neuroimaging study using cross-linguistic data to understand the impact of multilingualism on children’s cognitive and neural outcomes. Her most recent work concentrated on language typology, its relation to multilingual language competence and neural signatures.
DiverseSounds: How Prenatal Language Experience Shapes Fetal Brain Development and Later Language Learning. A Longitudinal Study
The prenatal period represents a critical window in which key neural structures and functions are shaped, laying the foundation for sensory processing, language learning, and cognitive function throughout an individual's lifetime. While research recognizes the importance of prenatal auditory and language stimulation, it is unclear whether and to what degree the language environment in utero shapes the fetal brain and language acquisition after birth. This proposal will focus on the prenatal language environment and its effects on neural plasticity and language development. We will adopt a longitudinal approach combining developmental cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, and information theory, using both novel and existing data.
Given the diversity of speech sounds across languages, multilingualism provides an excellent framework for studying environmental effects on early learning in typical development. DiverseSounds will investigate input-driven neuroplasticity of fetal brain organization, assess which characteristics of speech are processed by human fetuses, determine fetal neural predictors of inter-individual differences in speech sound perception in early infancy, and investigate if fetal neuroplasticity longitudinally predicts language learning mechanisms in infancy.
We will use state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques (MRI and EEG) in monolinguals and multilinguals, and novel measures of phonological diversity informed by descriptive and typological linguistic work. We propose to examine the relationship between prenatal experience and subsequent developmental trajectories of language acquisition from 25 weeks of gestation to 6 months of age. This research will advance our understanding of fetal and infant development and therefore bears significant implications for theory building, language therapy, and public health policy.
Keywords : Prenatal language acquisition, brain development, multilingualism, MRI, fMRI, EEG