De Diego Balaguer, Ruth

Biography

After his Degree in Psychologyhe is specialised at the University of Barcelona (UB) in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience during my PhD. After that, he spent three years as a post-doc at the INSERM U955 (Université Paris Est, Créteil, UPEC) where he studied the involvement of the striatum in the learning new rules in language. He also was maître de conferences (tenured) at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. After an ICREA Researcher period, he is currently an ICREA Research Professor at the UB. His research is mainly focused on the cognitive functions and neural circuits engaged in the extraction of grammatical rules while learning a new language.

Research Interest

His research combines information from brain-damaged patients, developmental populations and brain-imaging in healthy individuals to understand whether words and rules of language require different neural and cognitive mechanisms to be acquired since the earliest stages of contact with a new language. He is particularly interested in i) the role of the attentional systems in the acquisition of different aspects of language; ii) the role of the striatum as a brain structure that could make the interface between language and other cognitive functions necessary in the learning process; and iii) how is the acquired information consolidated and modified when we learn new additional information.