de Diego Balaguer, Ruth
ICREA Research Professor at Universitat de Barcelona (UB).
Social & Behavioural Sciences
Short biography
After a Degree in Psychology I specialised during my PhD at the University of Barcelona (UB) in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience. I spent three years as a post-doc at the INSERM in Paris (Université Paris Est, Créteil, UPEC) where I studied the involvement of the striatum in the learning of new rules in language. I was a Research-Lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris before I created my lab at the UB, back in Barcelona as an ICREA Junior Researcher. After that, I became an ICREA Research Professor and consolidated my group at the UB with an ERC Starting Grant. My research is mainly focused on the cognitive functions and neural circuits engaged in the extraction of grammatical rules while learning a new language.
Research interests
My 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. I am 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.