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Liquan Liu is a Senior Lecturer at School of Psychology, Western Sydney University and is affiliated with Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo. His main research interests lie in infant learning and development. 

Dr. Marina Kalashnikova is the leader of the Infant Language and Cognition research group at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language. She investigates the process of early language acquisition, specifically the emergence and consolidation of speech perception and word-learning over monolingual and bilingual infants’ first two years of life. The primary aim of her work is to define the earliest determinants of later individual language ability.

Dr. Sarah Kucker is currently an assistant professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University in the United States. Her research examines the mechanisms and processes underlying word learning and cognitive development with an emphasis on a dynamic systems approach to language development in infants and toddlers. Her work has a particular focus on examining the broader impacts of context and individual differences in the process of learning. Dr. Kucker also teaches various courses in developmental psychology, language and cognition, and research methods in psychology. 

Nivedita Mani is Professor of Psychology of Language at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Her work examines the factors underlying word learning and recognition in young children and views word learning as the result of a dynamic mutual interaction between the environment and the learner, with particular focus on the learner and what she knows, what she is interested in and, more recently, her motivation to learn.

She is principal investigator on a number of projects funded by the German Research Foundation (and the British Academy during her time in the UK). She has published extensively in her field, including the recent co-edited Volume Early Word Learning. She was elected to the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen in 2017 and has won prizes for her research, including the Fritz-Behrens Stifung Science prize.

She received a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2006. Following a short spell at the Center for Child Language at University of Southern Denmark, Odense, she returned to Oxford for a post-doctoral position between 2006 and 2008. During this time, she was also appointed as Career Development Fellow in Psychology at St Hugh's College, Oxford. She then moved to University College London on a British Academy post-doctoral fellowship examining phonological priming in infancy. She moved to Göttingen in January 2010 to set up the Psychology of Language Research Group and the associated infant language lab, WortSchatzInsel.

Ramona Kunene Nicolas (PhD) is a senior lecturer at the university of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in the Linguistics department. She earned her PhD in Psycholinguistics at the Université Grenoble Alpes, France. Her research interests include bilingualism, social cognition, language development, discourse analysis, multimodality of language (speech and co-speech gesture) and cross-linguistic typologies. Her main focus is on Bantu languages and South African languages.

Michael C. Frank is David and Lucile Packard Professor of Human Biology at Stanford University and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program. He received his PhD from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2010. He studies language use and language learning, focusing especially on early word learning. He is the founder of the ManyBabies Consortium, a collaborative replication network for infancy research, and has led open-data projects including Wordbank and MetaLab. He was a Jacobs Foundation Fellow and has received the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the FABBS Early Career Impact Award, and the Marr Prize and Glushko Dissertation Prize from the Cognitive Science Society. He served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society and has edited for journals including Cognition and Child Development.

Julien Mayor is a professor in developmental psychology at the University of Oslo (Norway). His research focuses on early word learning - using a range of investigation methods; eye-tracking, corpus analyses, computational modelling and tablet-based data collection. Julien is also involved in the development of rapid early vocabulary assessment. 

Caroline Rowland is Director of the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Professor of First Language Acquisition at Radboud University. Her research focuses on how children learn to communicate with language, how the developing brain supports this process, and how it is affected by cross-linguistic, cultural and individual variation. She takes a multiple methods approach - experimental work, naturalistic data analysis and computer modelling – to test the predictions of different models of the child’s learning mechanism. Her book, Understanding Child Language Acquisition, is an introduction to the most important research on child language acquisition over the last fifty years, and to some of the most influential theories in the field.

I was awarded my BBSc(Hons) in 1999 and my PhD (Psycholinguistics) in 2004, both from La Trobe University. Over my career I have worked at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The University of Manchester, and La Trobe University. Currently I am Professor of Linguistics at The Australian National University.

My research is in psycholinguistics. I work both on language acquisition (inc. first language acquisition, bilingualism, & second language acquisition) and adult language processing. My recent research has focused on individual differences in language acquisition and use, the relationship between language acquisition and on-line sentence processing in crosslinguistic perspective, and the influence of typological diversity on sentence planning and production. Accordingly, my research group works on several typologically-diverse languages. I also have a keen interest in how language interfaces with other social and cognitive processes. Along these lines, over the past 10 years or so my students and I have been investigating the relationship between language acquisition and symbolic play.

Irina A. Sekerina is a Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at the City University of New York. She studies bilingual language acquisition and processing, in particular, heritage languages. Her specialty is the Visual World eye-tracking paradigm.

Theodoros Marinis is Professor of Multilingualism at the University of Konstanz and at the University of Reading and Director of the Centre for Multilingualism at the University of Konstanz. His research focuses on language acquisition and processing across populations of monolingual and multilingual children with typical development as well as children with atypical language development, such as children with Developmental Language Disorders and children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. He conducts fundamental and applied research across the disciplines of linguistics, education, and speech & language pathology. He was part of the COST Action IS0804 'Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment' and led the development of the LITMUS Sentence Repetition tasks for multilingual children across a large range of languages. He is currently leading the EU project 'The Multilingual Mind' that provides multi-disciplinary training on multilingualism to early stage researchers in Europe.

Anne Fernald, Professor Emerita at Stanford University, combines observational and experimental methods to explore how parents’ verbal engagement with infants supports language learning.  Her early observational research on the melodies of mother’s speech across different languages was followed by experimental studies on infants’ affective responses to the prosody of child-directed speech.  She then began developing sensitive measures of the time-course of infants’ language understanding. In longitudinal studies with children from linguistically, culturally, and economically diverse families, her research has focused on the vital role of early language experience in strengthening children’s speech processing skills, which in turn facilitate vocabulary growth and language learning.  A central goal of this translational research program is to provide rigorous scientific evidence that parents from diverse linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds can play a vital role in supporting their children’s language and cognitive development.

Elena Lieven is professor emerita at the University of Manchester and was, until September 2020,  Director of the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD www.lucid.ac.uk). Her primary research areas include the relationship between children’s language development and their linguistic input, as well the differences in children’s language environments.  She is an elected Fellow of the British Academy and of the Cognitive Science Society and a member of Academia Europaea.

Alejandrina Cristia received her PhD in Linguistics from Purdue University in 2009 and did post-doctoral work on neuroimaging at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics before joining the French CNRS as a Researcher in 2013. She leads the Language Acquisition Across Cultures team, in a mixed unit cohosted by the Ecole Normale Supérieure, EHESS, and PSL in Paris, France. In 2021, she is an invited researcher in the Foundations of Learning Program of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and a guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Her research interests include: What are the linguistic representations that infants and adults have? Why and how are they formed? How may learnability biases shape the world’s languages?  To answer these questions, Dr. Cristia adopts a cognitive science approach (drawing from developmental psychology, linguistics, anthropology), and uses multiple methodologies (including corpora analyses, behavioral studies, computational modeling).

Thea Cameron-Faulkner studied Linguistics as a postgraduate at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and conducted her PhD in School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester/ Max Planck Institute, Leipzig. Her research focuses on the development of human communication and language. She is interested in the ways in which communication and language interact with social, cultural, and environmental factors. She uses of range of methods in her work but typically focuses on the analysis of real world recordings of caregiver-child interaction.