Rate My Professor Paola Escudero

Professor Paola Escudero serves as Professor in Linguistics and Director of Research at The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, a position she has held since January 2011. Previously, she was a researcher at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her academic background includes a PhD in Linguistics from Utrecht University in November 2005, a Master of Science in Applied Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh in February 2001, and a BA in Hispanic Linguistics and Literature from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru in August 1999.

Escudero's research centers on speech and visual processing in diverse populations, including monolingual and multilingual infants, young children, adults, and zebra finches. Her academic interests encompass listeners' processing of speaker and accent variation, monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual infant speech perception and word learning, cross-linguistic speech perception, production, and word recognition, the role of emotion, affect, and joint attention in language acquisition, and visual preferences in infancy through adulthood. She specializes in language learning in children and adults, multilingualism, and computational modelling of language learning, with expertise in linguistics, first, second, and bilingual language acquisition, and computational linguistics.

She has received major awards and honors, including the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship in November 2016, Excellence in Research as Researcher of the Year at the University of Western Sydney in December 2014, the Heineken Young Scientists Award for Cognitive Science from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in July 2010, Excellence Awards from the Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication in July 2009 and July 2007 for outstanding scientific output, and the Best Student Paper Award from the Acoustical Society of America Speech Communication Committee at the ASA 144th Conference in January 2002.

Escudero's publications have garnered over 9,200 citations on Google Scholar, underscoring her influence in speech perception, phonetics, and language acquisition. Key works include "Cross-Situational Learning of Minimal Word Pairs" (2015, Cognitive Science), "A cross-dialect acoustic description of vowels: Brazilian and European Portuguese" (2009, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America), "Dialect-specific modes influence second language production: evidence from bidialectal Shanghai–Mandarin Chinese learners of English within the second language linguistic perception model" (2025, Language Learning), "Enhancing heritage and additional language learning in the preschool years: longitudinal implementation of the Little Multilingual Minds program" (2025, Frontiers in Language Sciences), and "Mapping new names to known objects: ERP insights from cross-situational learning of novel written words" (2026, Neuropsychologia).