INFORMATION ABOUT THE POSITION
- Position: PhD researcher
- Researcher profile:First Stage Researcher (R1- up to the point of PhD)
- Number of vacancies: 1
- Project:Deco-B, Decoding Bilingual Speech Perception
- Founding source:Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and university
- Location: Spain > Donostia-San Sebastián
- Research field:Neuroscience > Cognition and Language
- Type of contract/Duration of Contract:Temporary, 4 years.
- Job Status:Full-time/Part-time
- Hours per week:35h per week for full-time / 17,5h per week for part-time
- Starting date:Autumn 2026
- Application deadline: May 2026

Information about the project

Decoding Bilingual Speech Perception (Deco-B) explores how the bilingual brain represents meaning across two structurally different languages: Spanish and Basque. The central question is whether bilinguals use separate language-specific semantic systems or a shared, unified semantic representation. To investigate this, the project combines advanced neuroimaging techniques (MEG and fMRI) with transformer-based multilingual AI models.



Twenty young adult Spanish-Basque bilinguals will listen to natural speech in both languages while their brain activity is recorded across multiple sessions. A specially designed bilingual speech corpus will support high-resolution neural decoding. The decoding models will be trained on brain activity from one language (e.g., Spanish) using semantic features extracted from pre-trained language models (such as GPT-2, XLM-R, mT5, and LaBSE). The models will then be tested on the other language (Basque) to assess cross-language generalization. The reverse direction (training on Basque, testing on Spanish) will also be examined to evaluate symmetry in bilingual semantic mapping. To integrate the spatial precision of fMRI and the temporal resolution of MEG, the project will use advanced multimodal fusion techniques, including cross-modal transformers, shared latent space models (e.g., Deep CCA, multimodal VAEs),

📌 Phd Researcher (Donostia / San Sebastián)
🏢 BCBL BASQUE CENTER ON COGNITION BRAIN AND LANGUAGE
📍 Donostia / San Sebastián