Postdoctoral Researcher

I completed my Ph.D. at the LSCP (Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique) under the supervision of Alejandrina Cristia in Paris. My dissertation addressed how language outcomes vary as a function of socioeconomic and ecological conditions.

In my current postdoctoral position, with Dr. Adrian Jaeggi at the Human Ecology group (Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich), I have been exploring whether developmental disorders are present or show any mainstream manifestation among the Tsimane, a contemporary Amazonian forager-horticulturalist society.

Most of what we know in early development comes from research on children in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) populations that are easily studied given the location of most research labs. WEIRD developmental conditions are neither representative of most contemporary humans nor representative of the situation that humankind has experienced for most of its evolutionary history, which is probably better captured by contemporary small-scale societies. There is much less information about the early environment, learning mechanisms, and language acquisition benchmarks among children in small-scale societies. Therefore, an interdisciplinary approach for studying early development across diverse socioeconomic and ecological conditions is fundamental for comprehending the broader picture in which language acquisition unfolds.

I experienced the benefits of using an interdisciplinary approach in this line of research. My ongoing collaboration with Jonathan Stieglitz, linguist Alejandrina Cristia, and psycholinguist Marisa Casillas has already nourished international efforts to standardize methods allowing for the comparison of extremely diverse populations with different languages, lifestyles, and parental attitudes. More broadly, these results have important implications for our understanding of human variation in cognitive and linguistic development.

My dissertation was funded by Paris Diderot and Ecole Doctorale FIRE-Programme Bettencourt.