Chen Zhao

I am a post-doctoral research associate working on the LuCiD project ‘The effects of the individual, home, and community on language development in UK families’. I completed my PhD at the University of Manchester, which investigated the longitudinal developmental trajectory of infant voice and vocal emotion processing using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). In this project, I also examined the influence of early maternal caregiving behaviour on infants’ neural sensitivity to emotional vocalisations. After achieving my PhD, I worked on the project exploring music and language comprehension and prediction in typically developing children and autistic children. My research interest focuses on children’s language and social emotional development using neuroscience and behavioural tools.