€2 million to research the linguistic development of bilingual babies from birth in the Basque Country
Marina Kalashnikova, an Ikerbasque researcher at BCBL, is one of the recipients of the prestigious 2025 Consolidator Grant from the European Research Council
Her team will combine different advanced observation and neuroimaging techniques to monitor babies exposed to Basque and Spanish from their first month of life
Developing the project in Gipuzkoa will enable a homogeneous sample of children learning the same two languages to be found
Ikerbasque researcher Marina Kalashnikova from the Basque Centre on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) is one of the beneficiaries of the 2025 call for applications for the prestigious Consolidator Grants from the European Research Council (ERC).
Kalashnikova, leader of the ‘Child Cognition and Language’ group, will receive €2 million in funding from the European Union to carry out the Bilingual LENS project over the next five years. This pioneering initiative seeks to identify the neurobiological and environmental factors that influence early language development in babies exposed to a bilingual environment from birth.
‘Most children in the world grow up acquiring more than one language. However, much of our knowledge about how they learn language is based on research with monolingual children. The Bilingual LENS project challenges this approach,’ explains the BCBL expert.
To fill this scientific gap, the project will conduct longitudinal studies with children born and raised in Gipuzkoa who hear Basque and Spanish spoken from their earliest days. The follow-up will cover from the first month to 24 months of age.
‘Our goal will be to measure how the properties of the linguistic environment to which babies are exposed, as well as their brain development during the first year of life, predict the development of their language skills in both languages during the second year,’ adds Kalashnikova.
Advanced technology
The study will combine observation techniques, neuroimaging and behavioural tests. On the one hand, special recorders will be used to evaluate and quantify how much speech babies hear in each language during social interactions in their homes.
On the other hand, the BCBL team will use complementary neuroimaging tools to analyse brain responses: electroencephalography (EEG), which offers high temporal resolution to detect speech processing speed, and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which allows the location of activity in the brain to be pinpointed.
‘The use of these advanced technologies will allow us to understand how specific parts of the bilingual baby’s brain specialise in processing language over time,’ says the researcher.
