Video: Meet Paola Escudero

Learning, Paola Escudero, Processing, Western Sydney University

Paola Escudero is a Chief Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language and Associate Professor at The MARCS Institute at Western Sydney University, which she joined in 2011. She has held a research position at the University of Amsterdam and a Visiting Assistant Professorship at the University of California in Los Angeles. Paola’s work focuses on speech and visual processing in diverse populations, including monolingual and multilingual infants, young children, and adults as well as zebra finches.

Paola’s current research interests include listeners' processing of speaker and accent variation, and monolingual, bilingual and multilingual infant speech perception and word learning. She studies cross-linguistic speech perception, production and word recognition, as well as the role of emotion/affect and joint attention in language acquisition.

At the Centre, Paola has undertaken many collaborations into how the learning of phonetic detail takes place in multilingual communities. These were best on show when she took on the enormous task of serving as a Scientific Chair for the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS2019), which took place in Melbourne in August 2019, where she was also involved in a number of co-authored presentations with collaborators from Western Sydney and Melbourne universities, and international institutions.

(This video was recorded at the Centre's annual member conference, CoEDLFest 2019.)