In 1999 Professor Dr. Anne Cutler won the prestigious Spinoza Prize. With this she set up the Baby Research Center as part of the research programme “Native and non-native listening”, thus establishing the first babylab in the Netherlands studying the language development of infants.

The first director of the babylab was Dr Daniel Swingley.

At that time the lab was located in the Spinoza building of the Radboud University, Nijmegen, a location that was far less child-friendly than the present location, where the lab has been since 2002. Christine Dietrich’s study was one of the studies carried out there under the supervision of Daniel Swingley. This led to the first doctoral thesis based on research carried out at the BRC. Moreover, this research was published last year in the leading international journal PNAS. In addition to this, Dan carried out a large number of experiments himself, on which he regularly published papers. Dan now has his own lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2003 Dr Elizabeth Johnson took over from Dan as director of the BRC. Although she is still involved in research here together with MPI staff, she is now a Professor at the University of Toronto where she has set up her own babylab. Marieke van Heugten, who carried out research at the babylab for her Master’s dissertation on the perception of diminutives, is now a PhD student in Toronto.