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Luisa Astruc-Aguilera - Neuroscience in EducationLuisa Astruc-Aguilera

Position/Status
  • Academic Associate
E-mail Address

mla28@cam.ac.uk

Phone

(+44) 01223 767507

Qualifications
  • PhD in Linguistics, University of Cambridge
  • MPhil in Linguistics, University of Cambridge
  • PGCE (Certificat d'Aptitut Acadèmica), Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
  • Philology, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
Membership of Professional Bodies/Associations

British Association of Academic Phoneticians

Profile

Since March 2008, Luisa has worked as a Research Associate on the project "Rhythmic timing and dyslexia: a causal connection?". The project is led by Professor Usha Goswami, Director of the Centre for Neuroscience in Education and looks at the influence of prosodically-related auditory deficits in developmental dyslexia.

Luisa is also an Affiliated Lecturer of the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, where she teaches and supervises Spanish linguistics. She also teaches an online course of Spanish at the Open University. In her free time, she participates in various collaborative projects on prosody and on prosody acquisition (see below).

Prior to that, she worked on the motivation for learning foreign languages (The Open University) and as a consultant for speech technology companies (Toshiba, Nuance). Her principal research interests lie in the areas of phonetics and phonology, the acquisition of prosody, and the role of prosody in the acquisition of literacy.

Research Topics

  • L1 prosody
  • The role of prosody in the acquisition of literacy
  • Motivation for learning foreign languages

Current Research Project(s)

  • "Rhythmic Timing and Dyslexia: A Causal Connection?" Funded by ESRC. P.I.: Professor Usha Goswami.
  • "Rhythm acquisition in Catalan, Spanish, and English" (Adquisició del ritme en català, castellà i anglès). September 2007-September 2008. Funded by Beques Batista i Roca, Generalitat de Catalunya (2007 PBR 29). P.I.: Pilar Prieto.
  • "Prosodic structure and the acquisition of prosody in Catalan and Spanish" (Estructura prosódica y adquisición de la prosodia en catalán y español). December 2006-December 2009. Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, Spain (HUM2006-01758/FILO). P.I.: Pilar Prieto.

Publications

(PhD thesis and some papers available from www.astruc.info)

Chapters in books:

Astruc, L. , Nolan, F. (2007) 'Variation in the intonation of sentential adverbs in English and Catalan', in C. Gussenhoven and T. Riad (eds) Tones and Tunes, Volume I: Typological and Comparative Studies in Word and Sentence Prosody. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 235-264.

Astruc, L. , Nolan, F. (2007) 'A cross-linguistic study of extra-sentential elements'. in P. Prieto, J. Mascaró, and M.J. Solé (eds.) Phonetics and Phonology in Iberia. John Benjamin, 85-107.

Ramírez, Mª D., Astruc, L. and B. Morán (2007) 'Entonación interrogativa en español y en inglés', in J. Dorta et al (eds) La prosodia en el ámbito románico. Colección Universidad. Madrid: La Página Ediciones S.L., 210-232.

Articles on motivation to learn foreign languages:

J.A. Coleman, Galaczi, Á., L. Astruc. (2007) 'Motivation of UK school pupils towards foreign languages: a large-scale survey at Key Stage 3'. Language Learning Journal 35, 2: 258-280.

Articles on prosody:

Astruc, L., Prieto, P. (2006) 'Acoustic cues of stress and accent in Catalan'. In R. Hoffmann and H. Mixdorff (eds) Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2006, TUDpress Verlag der Wissenschaften GmbH Dresden, 337-340.

Astruc, L., Prieto, P. (2006) 'Stress and accent: acoustic correlates of metrical prominence in Catalan', Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Experimental Phonetics, Athens 2006, 73-76.

Astruc, L. (2005) 'The form and function of extra-sentential elements', Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 2, 1-15.

Astruc, L. (2004) 'Right-dislocations: influence of information structure on prosodic phrasing and intonation', Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 1, 1-14.

Astruc, L. (2003) 'Sentence external-elements in Catalan'. In Pilar Prieto (ed) Catalan Journal of Linguistics, Romance Intonation, Vol. 2, 15-31.

Astruc, L. (2003) 'Intonation of right-dislocations in Catalan', Proceedings of the International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Barcelona, 1265-1268.

As editor:

Astruc, L. and M. Richards (eds) (2004) Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 1, 2004. Cambridge: Cambridge University, Linguistics Department.

Review articles:

Astruc-Aguilera, L. (2007) review of The Phonology of Catalan by Max Wheeler. Journal of the International Phonetics Association, 36:2, 215-219.

Astruc, L. (2007) review of The Verbal Complex in Romance, by Paola Monachesi. Journal of Linguistics, 43:2., 472-477.