Researchers

As leader of BabyLab, Professor Susan Hespos runs a research program on understanding the earliest evidence of cognitive capacities in infancy and what changes during development.

Professor Catherine Best is the Chair in Psycholinguistic Research and Leader of the Institute's Speech Production Laboratory. Her research focuses on how adults’ and infants’ experience with their native language shapes their perception and production of the phonological elements of spoken words, including consonants, vowels, lexical tones and prosodic patterns.

Professor Paola is research professor in Linguistics at The MARCS Institute. Her work focuses on speech and visual processing in diverse populations, including monolingual and multilingual infants, young children, and adults as well as zebra finches.

Professor Caroline Jones is a researcher within the Brain Sciences Program. Caroline’s research interests are in language development, language teaching and learning, language technology, and language issues in health, including early assessment and intervention and communication with elderly people.

Professor Denis Burnham is a research professor in our Speech and Language program and is the founder of the BabyLab at Western Sydney University. His research interests are in infant speech perception, cross-language speech perception, auditory-visual speech perception, lexical tone perception; special speech registers; speech and music; corpus studies; and human-machine interaction.

Dr Frances Doyle is a clinical psychologist and researcher. Frances has published peer-reviewedacademic articles on child, adolescent, and family psychology, and presented at national and international conferences.

Antonia investigates infants' and children's abilities to perceive native and non-native speech sounds and is particularly interested in how phonological categories are formed in the first year of life. To get a multifaceted view of the infant's abilities she uses different behavioral (e.g., looking times) and neural (electrophysiological and functional near-infrared spectroscopy) techniques.

Dr Liquan Liu is a Lecturer in Psychological Science within the School of Psychology. He is connected to our Speech and Language program and his research interests focus on the multi-dimensional effects of multilingualism on infant and child development.

Dr Genevieve Quek has extensive experience in continuous behavioural methods, and trained extensively in leading European cognitive neuroscience labs to build deep expertise in advanced electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). She joined MARCS as a Research Fellow in 2021.