Dr. Monica Barbir has joined ILCB after obtaining a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on her project “GLAL” (Grammar Learning Across Languages) at the Laboratoire d’Informatique et Systèmes (LIS) with Dr. Abdellah Fourtassi. She investigates how humans learn languages across the lifespan. Specifically, she is interested in the dynamic interactions between cognition and the environment that facilitate or impede learning.
Dr. Barbir completed her PhD at the Ecole Normale Supérieure under the supervision of Dr. Anne Christophe before diving into a post-doc at the International Research Center for Neurointelligence at the University of Tokyo. Her background in academic research is complemented by hands-on experience in foreign language teaching with the Japanese Exchange and Teaching programme and educational materials development through a Master’s in comic book design.
Dr. Barbir is co-founder of Kotoboo, a consortium of early-career researchers from around the world, dedicated to communicating scientific findings on language acquisition to caregivers and educators in a fun and accessible format: comics! The comics are available in 8 languages: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, English, French, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Ukrainian.