Dr. Núria Esteve Gibert
Núria Esteve Gibert investigates language acquisition in infancy and childhood, both in typical populations and in populations with language disorders. She is interested in how speech prosody interacts with body movements in the learning of linguistic structures and linguistic meaning. She has an experimental approach, using behavioral tasks and eye-tracking methodologies. Since 2018 she works at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, and she is a member of the Research Group on Cognition and Language (GRECIL) at the same university. She got her PhD in 2014 at the Pompeu Fabra University, studying how pre-lexical infants used spoken prosody and body movement to communicate, and she was later a post-doctoral researcher at Aix-Marseille Université and at the University of Barcelona.
Dr. Iris Nomikou
Iris Nomikou is co-Director of the Research Centre for Interaction, Development and Diversity and Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Her work crosses disciplinary boundaries and draws from interactional linguistics, cognitive science, and developmental psychology. She studies everyday interactions using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to holistically capture the ways in which early interactional experiences provide the ecology within which children participate in meaning making and discover and learn language, She has worked extensively on the interplay between talk and bodily experience for the development of meaning. Taking a continuity approach to the development of language she is interested in the creative solutions and different developmental paths that children use in learning to get things done with language, and has therefore also worked with recordings of children from different cultural communities as well as atypically developing children.
Dr. Marianne Jover
Marianne Jover is a full professor of developmental psychology affiliated with the PsyCLE laboratory at the University of Aix-Marseille. She investigates the impact of comorbidity on handwriting and motor adaptation in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. Her work also focuses on communicative development, particularly on gesture and the role of movements in promoting coordinated dyadic interactions in infants and preverbal children.
Dr. Nicolás Alessandroni
Nicolás Alessandroni is a postdoctoral fellow at the Concordia Infant Research Laboratory (Concordia University, Canada), currently supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture. Grounded in ecological psychology, his research interests encompass three core topics: how children discover and engage with increasingly complex possibilities for action, how interactions with caregivers shape and accelerate this process, and how developmental science can refine theories and methods to better capture these dynamics. Nicolás also leads and participates in projects within large-scale collaborative networks such as ManyBabies and ManyManys, investigating how Open Science and Big Team Science approaches can work together to advance our understanding of human development. Nicolás received his PhD in Psychology from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) in 2021, where his research centered on the relationship between object use and early conceptual development. In recognition of this work, he was awarded the prestigious Doctoral Dissertation Award by the Jean Piaget Society, USA, in 2023. His research has been featured in leading journals such as Nature Human Behavior, Royal Society Open Science, Developmental Science, Infancy, Infant Behavior & Development, Psychological Research, Adaptive Behavior, Memory StudiesPhilosophical Psychology, Theory & Psychology, and Collabra: Psychology.