Rate My Professor Narly Golestani

Narly Golestani is Associate Professor at the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub of the University of Vienna and at the Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology in the Faculty of Life Sciences. She heads the Brain and Language Lab there as well as at the Department of Psychology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where she previously held the position of Assistant Professor. Golestani earned her BSc in Psychology from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and her PhD in Clinical Psychology from McGill University and the Montreal Neurological Institute in Montreal, Canada. She conducted postdoctoral research at INSERM and CEA in Orsay, France, and at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, United Kingdom, where she also served as Senior Fellow.

Her research examines brain mechanisms of language processing from low-level auditory and phonetic features to high-level multilingualism and language control, incorporating individual differences in healthy populations, expertise in language and audition, and language disorders. Golestani employs methods including functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging, computational modeling of brain function, computational morphometry, machine learning, advanced statistics, neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and psychophysics. Current investigations address auditory cortex anatomy and its links to auditory, language, and music processing; multilingualism and language control; language aptitude; and computational modeling of language processing levels. She developed toolboxes for auditory cortex segmentation in structural MRI scans to quantify volume, surface area, thickness, shape, and spectral descriptors, applied in studies of lifespan development, gene discovery, brain-behavior relations, musicianship, multilingualism, dyslexia, and aphasia. As co-principal investigator, she contributes to Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research projects on language aptitude with Raphael Berthele and on prosody-to-meaning processing with Martin Meyer. Key publications encompass 'Intergenerational transmission of the structure of the auditory cortex and reading skills' (2026, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience), 'Aligning statistical models with inference goals in the neuroscience of language' (2026, Imaging Neuroscience), 'Brain activation for language and its relationship to cognitive and linguistic measures' (2025, Cerebral Cortex), 'Auditory cortex anatomy reflects multilingual phonological repertoire' (2025, eLife), 'Born with an Ear for Dialects? Structural Plasticity in the Expert Phonetician Brain' (2011, Journal of Neuroscience), and 'Brain structure predicts the learning of foreign speech sounds' (2007, Cerebral Cortex). Golestani has presented invited lectures at the Multilingual Minds seminar (University of Reading, 2022), Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (2021), Leipzig Lectures on Language (2021), and New York University (2021).