Christina Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden

My research investigates the perceptual, cognitive, and neural foundations of human communication in development. In particular, my work studies two important forms of communication: music and language. I ask questions related to how we attend to communicative signals, like speech and song, in real-world listening situations where many sounds compete for our attention. I compare music and language processing directly to one another to understand the similarities and differences between information processing in each domain from infancy to adulthood. And finally, I look at how features of music can be leveraged to improve language processing in individuals who struggle with language, such as those with Dyslexia. In the Language, Music, Attention, and Audition (LAMA) lab, we use a combination of methods like behavioural change detection and neural auditory envelope tracking to get a better picture of how it is we learn to attend to what’s relevant for communication.