Lluïsa Astruc

My current position is Lecturer in Spanish at the Department of Languages of The Open University. I am also an Affiliated Lecturer at the Spanish and Portuguese Department of the University of Cambridge.

Previously, I worked as an Associate Researcher at the Centre Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge (2008), Research Assistant on a project on motivation to learn modern languages (The Open University, 2006), and part-time as an Associate Lecturer of Spanish (The Open University, 2006-2008). I have also worked on speech technology on consecutive contracts as Spanish Language Expert and as Linguistics Expert (Toshiba Research Europe, 2005-2007).

I did my PhD in the Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Francis Nolan (2005) and with Alan Cruttenden and Pilar Prieto as examiners.  I also did an Mphil in the same department, also with Francis Nolan. Previous to that, I obtained a degree in Philology and a teaching qualification in Modern Languages (the equivalent of the British PGCE) from the University Rovira i Virgili, Spain (both 1996).

Research interests:

My research has dealt mainly with phonetics and phonology, especially prosody, and with language acquisition. I’m currently investigating how English, Spanish and Catalan children acquire the rhythm and the intonation of their native language (the APriL project, http://april-project.info).

Go to Research if you want to know more about this and other current research interests. Go to Publications if you want to download some of my recent papers.