Test Team
Meet The Team
DIRECTOR
Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein
Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein is a professor in the psychology department at Concordia University, holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Bilingualism and Open Science, and is the director of the Concordia Infant Research Laboratory. Originally from Fredericton, New Brunswick, she completed her undergraduate work at McGill University in 2003, before completing MA and PhD degrees at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Byers-Heinlein’s research investigates language acquisition and cognitive development, with a focus on bilingualism in infancy. She has published papers on topics such as language discrimination in newborn infants, and word learning by young bilinguals and trilinguals. Another line of research investigates how parental input influences bilingual development. Her research approach is multi-pronged, integrating techniques such as eye tracking, neuroimaging, high amplitude sucking, habituation, preferential looking, and parental report. Her work has two overarching aims: 1) To use data from bilingual infants to inform and extend theories of language acquisition, and 2) To provide empirical data that can inform the decisions of parents wishing to raise bilingual children.
(Languages: English & French)
Click here to download her CV (last updated September 2019)
Postdoctoral Fellows
Erin Quirk
Erin Quirk received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York with a project investigating predictors of bilingual children’s receptive and expressive language skill. Her research draws not only on her linguistic training but also the years she spent as a teacher to bilingual children in France. One current project asks how bilingual children’s ability to learn similarly sounding words (cognates) in their two languages develops over time. Another line of research focuses on aspects of bilingual experience that predict successful acquisition, such as children’s code-switching habits and the home literacy environment. Erin joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow in March of 2021.
(Languages: English, French, Spanish)
Laia Fibla Reixachs
Laia Fibla Reixachs joined the Infant Research Lab as a postdoctoral fellow in May 2021 as part of a longitudinal, two-site study investigating language development in bilingual infants and children in collaboration with Princeton Baby Lab. She received her Ph.D in Developmental Psychology at the University of East Anglia. Her project investigated the relationships between home language input and language processes early in development in infants growing up in diverse cultural settings (i.e., UK and rural India) using a new task. She did a Research Masters in Cognitive Science at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and a Bachelor in Psychology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her master thesis focused on bilingualism, word segmentation and computational modelling.
Languages: Catalan, Spanish, English, French, some German
Charlotte Moore
Charlotte Moore received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Duke University after completing a Masters in Linguistics at the University of Ottawa. Her research program focuses on sources of sound variability in infants’ language environments. She is interested in how bilingual infants manage multiple labels for the same objects and actions. Charlotte’s projects use a mix of corpus analysis, where she finds patterns in large collections of speech to infants and toddlers, and eyetracking, where she can explore the moment-to-moment processing that occurs as young children understand speech. She is seeking to understand the cognitive effects of learning from dual-language input. Charlotte joined the lab as a postdoctoral fellow in September of 2021.
(Languages: English, French)
Nicolás Alessandroni
Nicolás Alessandroni received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). His project investigated the development of conventional tool use during the first year of life and its relation to early conceptual thinking, based on an ecological-enactive, extended, distributed, and semiotic approach to cognition. Originally from Buenos Aires, he obtained his bachelor's degrees in psychology and music from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (Argentina) and his MA in Cognitive Psychology and Learning from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) / Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). He joined the lab in January 2022 as a Concordia Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow. As such, he focuses on the intersection between Open Science and infant research.
(Languages: Spanish, English, and French)
Graduate Students
Esther Schott
Esther Schott is a Ph.D. student in Psychology at Concordia University. Esther is particularly interested in how bilingual and monolingual infants learn to recognize words in the face of variability inherent in speech. For example, “apple” sounds different when it is pronounced by different speakers and with different accents, yet adults have little problem recognizing words across speakers and accents. How do infants achieve this? Specifically, do infants use the context (both immediate and their lifelong experience) to guide their word recognition? In a second line of research, Esther is studying whether infants are able to detect a language switch across single words, and whether infants can associate a language with a speaker. Esther’s master thesis (at McGill University) investigated which pairs of languages are hard or easy to discriminate.
(Languages: English, French, German)
Lena Kremin
Lena Kremin is a PhD student in psychology at Concordia University. Lena is interested in studying how bilingual infants tell apart the languages they hear, and learn two separate languages, instead of combining them into one. She is also looking at the speech patterns of parents and how they switch between French and English when speaking to their child. Lena joined the lab in 2018 after completing her Master’s degree in linguistics at Utrecht University.
(Languages: English, Spanish, Dutch, Italian)