11th Spring Research Conference

Núria Sebastián received her PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of Barcelona in 1986. Following postdoctoral training at the Max Plank Institute and the LSCP-CNRS in Paris, she was appointed senior lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology (University of Barcelona) in 1988 and was inducted as full professor in 2002. In 2009, she moved to the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She has held visiting scholar positions at several research centres, including the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS) at the University of Pennsylvania, the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN) at the University College London and the University of Chicago (2010). Her work has received international recognition, including a James S. McDonnell Foundation Award in 2001 (Bridging Mind, Brain and Behaviour Programme) and presenting the Nijmegen Lectures in 2005. She was awarded the ICREA Academia Prize by the Catalan Government in 2009 and in 2013. From 2002 to 2006 she served as a member of the advisory group for the OECD’s “Brain and Learning” initiative. In 2016 she was elected as a fellow of the British Academy. She was vice-president of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council from 2014 to 2016. 

She currently leads the Speech Acquisition and Perception (SAP) Research Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and coordinated the Consolider-Ingenio 2010 research consortium BRAINGLOT, focused on bilingualism and cognitive neuroscience. One of her current research projects is an ERC Advanced Grant “Under Control” investigating the relationship between attention and language development.

She has authored over 100 publications in international journals including Science, PNAS and The Journal of Neuroscience. She is currently associate editor of Developmental Science (since 2005) and Language Learning and Development (since 2013). She is also editor of the Cognitive Neuroscience Series of Language Learning and sits on the editorial boards of several journals, including Bilingualism: Language and Cognition and Trends in Neuroscience and Education.

Ruth Kircher is a senior researcher at the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI) in Flensburg, Germany. She also holds an affiliated position as associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Concordia University in Montreal and is a member of the Canadian Centre for Studies and Research on Bilingualism and Language Planning at the University of Ottawa. She holds degrees from the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg (MA), the University of Durham (MA), and Queen Mary University of London (PhD).

As a sociolinguist with a specialisation in multilingualism and minority languages, her work focuses on three interrelated areas: language attitudes and their influence on linguistic and social behaviour; language policy and planning at the societal level; and family language policy and intergenerational language transmission.

Her research experience spans a range of contexts in North America and Europe. Currently, her work focuses primarily on multilingual family language policies in Canada, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands. In addition to publishing extensively on her research, she has authored several publications on research methods and she co-edited the volume Research Methods in Language Attitudes (Cambridge University Press, 2022).