CV

Bio

I am an Associate Professor at the Cognitive Psychology Department of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary.

I am also the head of the Language and Brain Research Group, and the lab manager of the infant electrophysiology (EEG) lab of the Babylab.

I have two main research areas. One is the relationship between language acquisition and social cognition. It is a regular observation that infants’ language comprehension precedes their language production. However, recent results show that already 14-month-olds show brain responses very similar to adults, when another person misunderstands language. We investigate their surprisingly sophisticated social and communicative skills in playful situations, where we hope to learn how can they figure out what their social partners mean by what they say. In my experiments I try to learn more about the linguistic empathy of babies by measuring the extremely weak electricity accompanying neurocognitive mechanisms.

The second research area of mine is how we understand metaphorical expressions. I am investigating the neural responses both to figurative expressions and pictorial visualization of metaphors using EEG and fMRI.

Between 2017-2022 I was the PI of an Young Researcher Grant (FK-17) of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office of Hungary, working together with Lilla Magyari, PhD, on investigating language, mentaliatzion and pragmatic skills in infancy.

From 2017 to 2020 I was a postdoctoral fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) at ELTE University.

Between 2014-2016 I was a postdoc supported by the Fyssen Foundation at the LPP of Université Paris Descartes working with Judit Gervain, PhD. We were exploring early social and pragmatic aspects of language acquisition using neuroimaging methods (EEG & fNIRS).

Previously, between 2012-2014, at the Cognitive Development Center of the Central European University (CEU) as the postdoc of Professor György Gergely, I was studying contingency perception in infancy using eye-tracking, and early communicative and linguistic capacities of babies using EEG.

My PhD Thesis is about the neural correlates of metaphor comprehension and the role figures of speech play in scientific language and theories, supervised by Professor Csaba Pléh. During my doctoral studies I spent seven months with a Fulbright scholarship at UCSD in Professor Marta Kutas' lab learning to measure (ERPs), and about nine months at the Freie Universität Berlin with a DAAD scholarship hosted by Professor Arthur M. Jacobs where we run an fMRI experiment to explore the cognitive neuroscience of metaphor.