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Dr Evelyne Mercure

Staff details

Dr Evelyne Mercure

Position

Senior Lecturer

Department

Psychology

Email

e.mercure (@gold.ac.uk)

Evelyne studies infant neurocognitive development and especially the impact of language and communicative experience

Evelyne is a senior lecturer in the department of psychology at Goldsmiths. She is interested in infant neurocognitive development and the role of early communicative experience in shaping this process. She uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate how the infant brain develops functional specialisation for social stimuli, such as language, human voices and faces. She also uses eye-tracking and behavioural methods to clarify links between brain and cognitive development in infancy.
Evelyne's most recent work has focused on bilinguals, including bimodal bilinguals (hearing infants with deaf mothers exposed to BSL and English). Because of their language and communicative experience, these infants represent a unique opportunity of studying experience-dependent plasticity in early development.

Academic qualifications

  • BSc Speech and Language Therapy – Universite de Montreal 2002
  • MSc Neuroscience – Universite de Montreal 2004
  • PhD Psychology – Birkbeck, University of London 2008

Teaching and supervision

Research interests

Evelyne also has a strong interest in public engagement. In addition to offering science workshops for children and presentations for parents of bilingual children, she has also been involved as a science advisor to Baby Brains and as a school governor to Tidemill Academy.

Featured publications

Publications and research outputs

Article

Mousley, Victoria L.; MacSweeney, Mairéad and Mercure, Evelyne. 2024. Revisiting perceptual sensitivity to non-native speech in a diverse sample of bilinguals. Infant Behavior and Development, 76, 101959. ISSN 0163-6383

Dopierała, Aleksandra A.W.; López Pérez, David; Mercure, Evelyne; Pluta, Agnieszka; Malinowska-Korczak, Anna; Evans, Samuel; Wolak, Tomasz and Tomalski, Przemysław. 2023. Watching talking faces: The development of cortical representation of visual syllables in infancy. Brain and Language, 244, 105304. ISSN 0093-934X

Mousley, Victoria L; MacSweeney, Mairéad and Mercure, Evelyne. 2023. Bilingual toddlers show increased attention capture by static faces compared to monolinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 26(4), pp. 835-844. ISSN 1366-7289

Conference or Workshop Item

Stamate, Daniel; Davuloori, Pradyumna; Logofatu, Doina; Mercure, Evelyne; Addyman, Caspar and Tomlinson, Mark. 2024. 'Ensembles of Bidirectional LSTM and GRU Neural Nets for Predicting Mother-Infant Synchrony in Videos'. In: Engineering Applications of Neural Networks: 25th International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks (EANN 2024). Corfu, Greece 27 - 30 June 2024.

Stamate, Daniel; Haran, Riya; Rutkowska, Karolina; Davuloori, Pradyumna; Mercure, Evelyne; Addyman, Caspar and Tomlinson, Mark. 2023. 'Predicting High vs Low Mother-Baby Synchrony with GRU-Based Ensemble Models'. In: Artificial Neural Networks and Machine Learning – ICANN 2023. Heraklion, Crete, Greece 26-29 September 2023.

Grants and awards

Evelyne’s work has been supported by research funding from British and international organisations such as: ESRC, Wellcome Trust, UCL, Birkbeck, Canadian Institute of Health Research, Fond de la recherche en santé du Québec.