News

The CNE BabyRhythm research has informed a groundbreaking project in India launched by a range of charities (Billion Readers, Pratham Education Foundation, and EkStep Foundation) working within the Bachpan Manao (Celebrate Childhood) initiative to document infant lullabies (First Songs) in all the languages of India. The website already has more th…

Professor Usha Goswami has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in recognition of the global significance of her research.  Founded in 1780, the AAAS honours excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavour to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work togethe…

A new publication from the project funded by the Fondation Botnar has published in the Frontiers in Psychology journal, July 2024.When children learn to speak, they learn the special “sound shape” of words in their language. For example, in English they learn that ‘broom’ and ‘bread’ begin in the same way. They come to be aware that words are made …

A new publication from the project funded by the Yidan Foundation has been published in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Journal, in June 2024.Atypical low-frequency cortical encoding of speech identifies children with developmental dyslexiaSlow cortical oscillations play a crucial role in processing the speech amplitude envelope, which is perce…

New research findings have been published from the BabyRhythm project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC).A recent publication reveals how the infant brain tracks the rhythm of visual speech, and how this has implications for later language development. As part of the BabyRhythm project, in which infants’ brain responses to speech, sound…

Our study funded by the Fondation Botnar project has recently published findings in the Clinical Neurophysiology Journal.The prevalent ‘core phonological deficit’ model of dyslexia proposes that the reading and spelling difficulties characterizing affected children stem from prior developmental difficulties in processing speech sound structure, for…

A new publication from the BabyRhythm project funded by the European Research Council (ERC)Decoding speech information from EEG data with 4-, 7- and 11-month-old infants: Using convolutional neural network, mutual information-based and backward linear modelsHere, we applied three computational methods to decode speech information from neural activi…

Why reading nursery rhymes and singing to babies may help them to learn languageResearchers find that babies don’t begin to process phonetic information reliably until seven months old which they say is too late to form the foundation of language.Researchers say parents should speak to their babies using sing-song speech, like nursery rhymes, as so…

A new publication from the project funded by the Fondation Botnar was published in the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Journal, in September 2023. Neural responses to natural and enhanced speech edges in children with and without dyslexiaDyslexia is a developmental language disorder affecting reading and spelling. While traditionally viewed as a di…

The first publication from the project funded by the Fondation Botnar was published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America on 19th October 2021.Children’s brains need time to develop crucial listening skillsIt is well documented that children are generally worse at being able to hear speech clearly when there is background noise, such …

The first paper from the BabyRhythm project was published this week in the journal Brain and Language. Using EEG data from 8-week-old infants, we showed that a machine learning approach can be used to accurately classify whether an infant was hearing rhythmic speech or a rhythmic non-speech sound. First author Samuel Gibbon achieved this by buildin…

Professor Goswami is elected Fellow of the Royal SocietyCongratulations to Professor Goswami who has been elected Fellow of the Royal Society for her fundamental contributions to understanding how individual differences in children's 'phonological awareness' (of word sound structure) underpin reading development and dyslexia across languages. Find …

We are pleased to announce that Professor Usha Goswami has been elected for membership of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.The Leopoldina was founded in 1652 in Schweinfurt/Germany and is thus the oldest continuously existing academy of natural sciences and medicine in the world. The Academy selects its members among outstanding s…

We are delighted to share a picture of Professor Usha Goswami receiving her CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) at Windsor Castle. The CBE was awarded by Princess Anne during an afternoon ceremony. Professor Goswami received her CBE in the Queen's New Years Honours list in January 2021, but the investiture was delayed by Covid 19. Th…

Professor Usha Goswami FBA explains what it is that neuroscientists study and how their research impacts our understanding of what it is to be human.https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/what-is-neuroscience/