Antonella Sorace
Premio Gadda Giovani – Membro del Comitato Nazionale
Scottish Gadda Juniors – Panel 4 Judge
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. She currently also holds a part-time visiting professorship (Professor II) at the University of Tromsø. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. From 2005 to 2007 she was the holder of a British Academy Research Readership. In her career she has held research appointments and visiting professorships at numerous institutions, including the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Johns Hopkins University, Michigan State University, the University of Hamburg, and the University of Siena.
Sorace’s research focuses on a number of interrelated questions that bring together linguistics, experimental psychology and cognitive science, and her research achievements span different sub-fields of scientific enquiry. She is a world leading authority in the field of bilingual language development, where she 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 theoretical 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.
Sorace is committed to disseminating the findings of research on bilingualism outside academia. She is the founder of the information and consultancy service Bilingualism Matters and was recently awarded a Beltane Fellowship for Public Engagement.
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