Professor Laura Bosch, University of Barcelona, Spain

Dr. Laura Bosch is Professor in Psychology at the University of Barcelona, where she received her PhD. Her scientific interests were initially focused on phonological development and disorders from her former background in the area of Speech and Language Pathology.

Starting in year 1995 and in close collaboration with Prof. Dr. N. Sebastián-Gallés, she began to work on speech perception in infancy, with the setting of the first laboratory for infant perception studies in Spain. Her research interests are focused on the study of phonetic perception and early lexical development in bilingual language acquisition, but they have recently been extended to at risk populations for neurocognitive disorders, such as prematurely born infants.

Abstract Developmental Continuity in Infants’ Speech Perception Capacities: from Sounds to Words
A review of the main milestones in the development of speech perception capacities in infancy will be presented, from early tuning to the sound pattern of the native language to the building of phonetically detailed representations of linguistically relevant units, such as words, by the end of the first year of life. These abilities are considered to be fundamental for an adequate progress in language development in these early years. The study of their predictive value for the identification of infants at risk for language-related difficulties is now a promising area of research.