Maria Teresa Guasti - Biography#

Maria Teresa Guasti holds a PhD from the University of Geneva. Her dissertation on causatives and perception verbs has generated several peer reviewed articles and a book and is still a reference point in the field.

After being trained as a theoretical linguist, Guasti has switched to language acquisition and has researched on first and early second language acquisition, on developmental language impairments, dyslexia. She also has expanded her interests on other cognitive aspects related to developmental language impairment, such as musical cognition and on handwriting (as a motor control activity). In this area, she has contributed to a new perspective on dyslexia, discovering an impairment in timing anticipation. More recently, she has started to collaborate with human-computer interaction scientists to develop interactive technologies (virtual and augmented reality, smart objects and conversational agents) based on language.

She has been visiting MIT (Brain and cognitive science dept.), has been visiting professor at Cambridge University, Macquarie University.

She (co-)authored about 160 publications (among which 80 articles in peer reviewed journals, 6 books, articles in volumes and proceedings), more than 7000 citations and a H-index of 42 (Google scholars). Her research has been supported by several national and international grants (Cost Action, LLP grant, Erasmus +, International Training Network, Multimind) and more recently she has been awarded a ERC Sinergy with Alexiadou and Sauerland (Leibnizdream).
She has trained 14 Ph.D students, supervised 12 post docs, about 100 Master students. She has served as external PhD examiner.

She has been Associate Editor for Language Acquisition, Frontiers in Psychology and is on the board of Journal of Child Language, Biolinguistics, Glossa, First Language.

She has been keynote speaker of several international conferences and taught in several summer schools.