Clarissa Montgomery

Clarissa is a Ph.D. student working at the Babylab of the Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Centre, at Université Paris-Cité. Prior to joining Babylab, she completed a Master's degree in Cognitive Science (Cogmaster), and a Bachelor's degree in Health Sciences and in Linguistics at Simon Fraser University.

Her current research focus is on the lexical-semantic development of bilingual and monolingual infants. In particular, she is interested in how the familiarity of a voice can contribute to word learning and understanding. Previous studies have found numerous advantages of the maternal voice in infant language learning, but she is interested in whether a familiar voice alone without any emotional or affective links could help facilitate word understanding in young infants. She is currently working on a collaboration with Dr. Janet Werker, regarding the development of the lexical-semantic system in bilingual infants.