Caroline Junge examines the factors that play a role in early child development. To better grasp patterns of individual variation, she collaborates with researchers from various faculties, including those of Social Sciences, Humanities, and Medicine. Part of her research focuses on the interplay between early brain development with environmental factors predict variation in language development (VIDI-grant 2023-2027). Earlier, she examined whether a familiar voice (such as the child's mother) facilitates early word learning (personal VENI-grant fincanced by the Dutch government). She is also responsible for the neurocognitive task battery in the grand-scale infant and pre-adolescent YOUth cohort studies from the Consortium Individual Development (CID), in wich she focuses on the development of social competence. Here, I am the contact person for EEG recordings and language tasks (amongst others).
To grasp individual differences,she strongly believes that the measures that yield these differences should be valid. Another theme that consequently runs like a thread through her career is infant methodology. To illustrate, she participated in the ManyBabiesConsortium (ManyBabiesConsortium, 2020); she co-applied successfully for a replication grant with the Dutch universities’ Babylabs consortium (NWO 401.18.044; Applicant: Prof. Clara Levelt; Spit et al., 2023; Geambusu et al., 2023), and she compared different infant testing procedures with the same training-and-test paradigm (Junge, Everaert et al., 2020).