University of Milano-Bicocca

Maria-Teresa Guasti, Fabrizio Arosio, Francesca Foppolo, Francesca Panzeri

Guasti is a full professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Psychology and coordinator of the Ph.D. program in Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience. Guasti’s psycholinguistics lab conducts research on typical and atypical language acquisition, using a range of behavioral techniques as well as ERP. This research covers the acquisition of prosody, morphosyntax, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and their interfaces. It has concentrated on the acquisition of wh-questions, relative clauses, pronouns, scalar implicatures and the role of salience and focus in sentence production in several languages (Italian, German, Greek, French). These topics have been investigated in typical children and in children with Specific Language Impairment and Dyslexia.
Guasti’s research has been funded through (inter)national grants and private foundation grants (European projects: COST-Actions A33 and IS0804, and CLAD; PI of LLP project “Cross-linguistic language diagnosis”; two national projects (PRIN); project from a bank foundation). She is the author of 100 articles in peer reviewed journals (such as Language Acquisition, Journal of Speech and Language Pathology, Lingua, First Language Clinical linguistics and Phonetics) and volumes, of two books, and a major textbook on language acquisition used worldwide (2nd edition 2016).
Within the LACA collaboration, Guasti’s lab studies the understanding of non-literal meaning, including scalar implicatures, processing of rhythmic properties of language and use of morphosyntactic features in children with ASD.