A new paper on the social foundations of infants' language comprehension has been published.
We argue that the language system is sensitively responding to another person's mere presence because it may be built more as a social system, not simply to decode language input.
Forgács, B., Parise, E., Gervain, J., Berkes, N., Szigeti, A., Feride, B. B., & Király, I. (2026). The Intriguingly Social N400 of Preverbal Infants. Developmental Neurobiology, 86(2), e70027. https://doi.org/10.1002/dneu.70027
I am an associate professor at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, working in the Babylab of the Department of Cognitive Psychology, where I am the lab manager of the EEG lab of the Babylab and lead the Language and Brain Research Group. Currently I am also a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin for two years starting from June 2023.
My research has two main threads. I investigate the interaction between social cognition, Theory-of-Mind and language acquisition, by studying early communicative-pragmatic skills in infants using neuroscientific methods like EEG. I am also exploring, in adults, the neurocognitive mechanisms of the comprehension of metaphorical expressions using EEG and the processing of pictorial visual metaphors using fMRI. The overarching theme is how language is used as a communicative tool in social situations, how meaning is born out of communicative intentions, and how language comprehension is implemented in the human brain.