Biographie

Tatjana A. Nazir is a cognitive psychologist and research director at the Laboratory for Language, Cognition and the Brain at the Institute for Cognitive Science (CNRS-University Lyon 1) in Bron, France. She is the instigator and a permanent member of the Brain & Language team since 1998. Her research focuses various aspects of language and mind. Much of her initial work was on visual word recognition and on the influence of reading direction and writing systems on the perception of print. By analyzing healthy readers with atypical lateralization of brain structures for language production (developed in the right hemisphere instead of the left) one important insight from this work is that beyond and above cultural aspects linked to the way we read, anterior cortical language processes of the dominant hemisphere modulates the lateralization of lower level processes in the visual stream during the perception of print.

Today her interest is in the role environment plays in the development of cognitive processes (Embodied Cognition). In particular, how sensory-motor experiences contribute to the understanding of language, and how shared neural circuits between action, perception and language can be used for purposes of training and rehabilitation of language deficits. Through the analysis of performance of patients that suffer from Parkinson’s disease (a neurological disorder that affects the motor system) and through examination of electrophysiological markers for semantic processes, her team was one of the first to clearly establish that cortical motor systems contribute to the understanding of language that describes motor action.

Tatjana A. Nazir serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Physiology-Paris where she recently edited a special issue on Language and action (2008). She is also member of the RTN-LAB Marie Curie research and training network coordinated by Andy W. Ellis.