Nan Xu Rattanasone

My research focuses on Language Acquisition in children (monolingual, bilingual and those with hearing loss) and adult second language learners. I am interested in early bilingual development in pre-schoolers: how children acquire multiple languages, how they develop language competency, and the implications of bilingualism for school readiness. My research has contributed to a better understanding of early bilingual development especially for children learning two languages that are very different in both their sound system and grammar (e.g., Mandarin and English). In practical terms, the work has helped develop language assessments that measure pre-schoolers' language abilities in terms of comprehension and use of grammar (including inflectional grammar).

I received my PhD in Psychology from the MARCS Institute of Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney in 2009. I am currently a postdoctoral research fellow working on several projects including the ARC Laureate Fellowship funded project on 'Neural and behavioural evidence for children's learning of grammatical morphology’, the HEARing Cooperative Research Centre and NHMRC project (at the National Acoustics Laboratory) examining language development for children with hearing loss. I am also the Deputy Director of the Child Language Lab, a member of the Macquarie University Centre for Language Sciences and an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellences in Cognition and Its Disorders.