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Dr Evelyne Mercure

Staff details

Position Lecturer
Department Psychology
Email e.mercure (@gold.ac.uk)
Phone +44 (0)20 7 919 7859
Dr Evelyne Mercure

Evelyne is a 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 near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) 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 bilingual infants as well as hearing infants with deaf mothers. 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.

Publications

Article

MacSweeney, M; Mercure, Evelyne; Evans, S.; Pirazzoli, L.; Goldberg, L.; Bowden-Howl, H.; Coulson-Thaker, K.; Beedie, I.; Lloyd-Fox, S. and Johnson, M.H.. 2019. Language experience impacts brain activation for spoken and signed language in infancy: Insights from unimodal and bimodal bilinguals. Neurobiology of Language, ISSN 2641-4368

Pote, Inês; Wang, Siying; Sethna, Vaheshta; Blasi, Anna; Daly, Eileen; Kuklisova‐Murgasova, Maria; Lloyd‐Fox, Sarah; Mercure, Evelyne; Busuulwa, Paula; Stoencheva, Vladimira; Charman, Tony; Williams, Steven C. R.; Johnson, Mark H.; Murphy, Declan G. M. and McAlonan, Grainne M.. 2019. Familial risk of autism alters subcortical and cerebellar brain anatomy in infants and predicts the emergence of repetitive behaviors in early childhood. Autism Research, 12(4), pp. 614-627. ISSN 1939-3792

Bussu, Giorgia; Jones, Emily J. H.; Charman, Tony; Johnson, Mark H.; Buitelaar, Jan K.; Blasi, Anna; Baron-Cohen, Simon; Bedford, Rachael; Bolton, Patrick; Chandler, Susie; Cheung, Celeste; Davies, Kim; Fernandes, Janice; Gammer, Isobel; Garwood, Holly; Giraud, Jeanne; Gui, Anna; Hudry, Kristelle; Lieu, Michelle; Mercure, Evelyne; Lloyd-Fox, Sarah; Maris, Helen; O’Hara, Louise; Pickles, Andrew; Ribeiro, Helena; Salomone, Erica; Tucker, Leslie and Volein, Agnes. 2019. Latent trajectories of adaptive behaviour in infants at high and low familial risk for autism spectrum disorder. Molecular Autism, 10(1),

Mercure, Evelyne; Kushnerenko, Elena; Goldberg, Laura; Bowden‐Howl, Harriet; Coulson, Kimberley; Johnson, Mark H and MacSweeney, Mairéad. 2018. Language experience influences audiovisual speech integration in unimodal and bimodal bilingual infants. Developmental Science, 22(1), e12701. ISSN 1363-755X

Mercure, Evelyne; Quiroz, Isabel; Goldberg, Laura; Bowden-Howl, Harriet; Coulson, Kimberley; Gliga, Teodora; Filippi, Roberto; Bright, Peter; Johnson, Mark H. and MacSweeney, Mairéad. 2018. Impact of Language Experience on Attention to Faces in Infancy: Evidence From Unimodal and Bimodal Bilingual Infants. Frontiers in Psychology, 9(1943),

Knowland, Victoria C.P.; Mercure, Evelyne; Karmiloff-Smith, Annette; Dick, Fred and Thomas, Michael S.C.. 2013. Audio-visual speech perception: a developmental ERP investigation. Developmental Science, 17(1), pp. 110-124. ISSN 1363-755X

Further profile content

Dr Evelyne Mercure's Links

Featured publications

2019: Plasticity in the neural substrate of language: Insights from unimodal and bimodal bilingual infants

2018: Language experience influences audiovisual speech integration in unimodal and bimodal bilingual infants

2018: Impact of language experience on attention to faces in infancy: Evidence from unimodal and bimodal bilingual infants

2011: Early specialization for voice and emotion processing in the infant brain

2008: Differential lateralization for words and faces: category or psychophysics?

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.