Media contributions
1Media contributions
Title Episode 16: Dr. Antonella Sorace Media name/outlet Learning Cosmos Podcast Country/Territory United Kingdom Date 12/08/25 Description This season kicks off with a deep dive into language learning and bilingualism, featuring one of the world’s leading voices in the field:
Antonella Sorace (Laurea, University of Rome; MA, University of Southern California; PhD, University of Edinburgh) is Professor of Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Professor at University College London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In her career she has held research appointments and visiting professorships at numerous institutions, including the University of Utrecht, the University of Trondheim, the University of Tromsø, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, the University of Hamburg, and the University of Siena.
Her research focuses on a number of interrelated questions that bring together linguistics, experimental psychology and cognitive science, and her research achievements and publications span different sub-fields of scientific enquiry. She is a world leading authority on bilingualism over the lifespan and is particularly well known for her studies of exceptionally talented ("near-native") adult second language speakers; for her research on the changes ("attrition") that take place in the native language of advanced second language speakers; for her investigation of bilingual language acquisition in early and late childhood, and of the effects of bilingualism in non-linguistic domains.
She is also internationally known for her contribution to language typology, especially for her research on constrained variation at the lexicon-syntax interface, which she has investigated in many languages, and her studies of gradience in natural language. Moreover, she has given an important contribution to experimental methods in linguistics by pioneering the use of Magnitude Estimation as a technique for the elicitation of linguistic acceptability judgments. She is committed to disseminating the findings of research on bilingualism outside academia and was awarded a Beltane Fellowship for Public Engagement.
She is the founding director of the non-profit organisation Bilingualism Matters (www.bilingualism-matters.org), which has a wide international network of branches all over the world, including one in Edinburgh (https://www.bilingualism-matters.org/network/edinburgh).Persons Antonella Sorace