Marina Kalashnikova

Keywords: language acquisition, lexicon, bilingualism, dyslexia, infant directed speech, speech perception.

Kalashnikova is a Staff Scientist at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) where she leads the Infant Language and Cognition Research Group. She completed her Bachelor and Master degrees in Languages and Linguistics at the University of Texas at El Paso, USA and her PhD in Psychology at Lancaster University, UK. She joined the BCBL in 2018 and was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Currie research fellowship (2018-2020) from the European Commission. In 2020, she has been awarded the Ikerbasque Research Fellowship (Basque Foundation of Science) and the Ramon y Cajal Research Fellowship (Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades). Kalashnikova's research investigates language acquisition, specifically the emergence and consolidation of speech perception and word-learning skills over infants’ first two years of life. Her approach is characterized by a focus on the qualities of infants’ early linguistic environment, and its role in shaping individual developmental trajectories. This approach affords a unique insight into the exogenous factors that shape the linguistic system of each child, and it allows for the isolation of the aspects that foster successful development and optimization of early language experiences of children who are or are not at-risk for language delay. She employs a combination of methods from neuroscience, experimental psychology, and linguistics.