Research Assistant Position - ERC Advanced GRANT - Disordered SPEECH

Puesto: Research Assistant Position - ERC ADVANCED GRANT - DISORDERED SPEECH
Location: Donostia / San Sebastián

BCBL BASQUE CENTER ON COGNITION BRAIN AND LANGUAGE
Organisation/Company BCBL BASQUE CENTER ON COGNITION BRAIN AND LANGUAGE Research Field Neurosciences Researcher Profile First Stage Researcher (R1) Positions Research Support Positions Final date to receive applications 1 Sep 2026 - 23:59 (Europe/Madrid) Country Spain Type of Contract Temporary Job Status Full-time Hours Per Week 35 Offer Starting Date 1 Oct 2026 Is the job funded through the EU Research Framework Programme?

Horizon Europe - ERC Reference Number ERC-2024-ADG_ Is the Job related to staff position within a Research Infrastructure? No
Offer Description   The  Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL)  is offering a  Research Assistant position  within the  DISORDERED SPEECH  project, recently funded by the  European Research Council (ERC) .
Advances in recent years have improved our ability to address language problems in both children and adults, with roughly 7 % of children known to have significant spoken language problems (developmental language disorder, DLD) and another 7 % having written language problems (developmental dyslexia, DD). Early identification remains difficult, and no theory has yet explained their overlaps. The ERC-funded DISORDERED-SPEECH project will introduce and explore a novel research frontier for developmental language disorders, focusing on speech rhythm and the accurate production of prosodic patterns.

It will use novel speech-production tasks alongside the neural theory of child language acquisition to develop tools for the identification of DD and DLD across a variety of European languages.

Job Description:

Coordinate participant recruitment and testing through outreach activities  in the BCBL Junior Lab (Colegio Carmelitas Sagrado Corazón) in Vitoria-Gasteiz
Collect behavioural and neuroimaging data from bilingual children with and without developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorders  in the BCBL Junior Lab (Colegio Carmelitas Sagrado Corazón) in Vitoria-Gasteiz .
Collaborate on the finalization and implementation of experimental designs
Preprocess and organize behavioural data
Participate in regular scientific meetings of the research groups at BCBL
Contribute to the dissemination of research findings to the general public
Marie Lallier  is an Ikerbasque Research Professor and the leader of the Educational Neuroscience and Developmental Disorders group. The group has extensive experience in clinical and educational neurocognitive science research and employs a wide range of behavioural and neuroimaging techniques (e.g., EEG, MEG), as well as diverse experimental designs (e.g., longitudinal, training-based, and single-case studies) involving young populations with or without developmental language disorders.

The team is also strongly committed to the societal impact of science, actively engaging in the transfer of scientific knowledge to society by working closely with clinicians and educators and fostering dialogue between scientists and the broader community.
Marina Kalashnikova  is an Ikerbasque Research Professor and the leader of the Infant Language and Cognition group Thegroup investigates the process of early language acquisition in monolingual and bilingual infants, as well as the interactions between early language abilities and the development of general perceptual and cognitive capacities. The group’s primary objective is to define the earliest determinants of later individual language ability, including but not limited to endogenous factors, such as family risk for developmental language disorders or hearing loss, and environmental factors, such as the quantity and quality of infants’ early language input.

The team is highly multidisciplinary; our expertise combines the fields of linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience. The group members have unrestricted access to the BCBL’s Baby Lab, a state-of-the-art facility that hosts specialized methods for investigating the first steps of human language development, including fNIRS, EEG, eye-tracking, and LENA, among others.
Excellent written and oral communication skills in both Basque and Spanish
Previous experience…