Full Professor at the Department of Linguistics, School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. Scientific coordinator of the Center of Linguistics of the University of Lisbon. Director of the Lisbon Baby Lab. Executive Director of the Mind-Brain College. Editor-in-chief of Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, and Associate Editor of Phonetica. My research focuses on early speech perception and language development, and on prosody in language. Language acquisition, typical and atypical, is a challenging and exciting research field. Prosody is also a fascinating domain, as it comprehends sub-syllabic units to sentence/discourse-level units, it interfaces with segmental phonology, morphology and syntax, it is relevant to information structure, language processing, or human interaction, and it plays a crucial role in language acquisition. In my work, I seek to understand the properties of prosodic systems across and within languages, and how they are acquired by infants. I also study how prosody may help bootstrapping the learning of language, and may provide early markers of language impairment. I am particularly interested in multisensory constraints on language acquisition, both in typical development and in clinical populations. My research is strongly rooted in multidisciplinary collaborations, and in partnerships with health, education and parent institutions.

Dr. Molnar received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at McGill University. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the neural and behavioral correlates of monolingual and bilingual speech processing. At McGill, she also conducted research on how bilingual and monolingual learning contexts affect typical language development in preverbal infants exposed to English and/or French. Previous to joining the Department of Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Toronto, she completed her postdoctoral training at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, & Language (BCBL) in Spain (where she also became a Staff Scientist and Research Group Leader). At the BCBL, her research focused on how young children and infants who learn Spanish and/or Basque adapt to a bilingual or a monolingual environment at the neural, cognitive, and behavioral levels.