Maria Teresa Guasti

Maria Teresa Guasti is a linguist specializing in language acquisition. She is professor of linguistics and psycholinguistics at the University of Milano-Bicocca.

Education and career Before her academic career, Guasti worked in information technology, first as a researcher at Olivetti in Turin (1984–5) and then as a software developer for Fininvest in Milan (1985–7).

Guasti's first academic job after her doctorate was as a researcher at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan (1994–7), where she began to combine her interest in linguistic theory with the study of language acquisition. It is now in its second edition (2017), and has been cited well over a thousand times.

Guasti has been the recipient of numerous honours and awards. In 2019 she was awarded an ERC Synergy Grant for the project ‘Realizing Leibniz’s Dream: Child Languages as a Mirror of the Mind’ together with Artemis Alexiadou and Uli Sauerland; the project runs from 2020 to 2026. In 2021 she was elected ordinary member of the Academia Europaea.

Selected publications Guasti, Maria Teresa. 1993. Verb syntax in Italian child grammar: finite and nonfinite verbs. Language Acquisition 3 (1), 1–40. Guasti, Maria Teresa. 1993. Causative and perception verbs: a comparative study. Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier. Chierchia, Gennaro, Stephen Crain, Maria Teresa Guasti, Andrea Gualmini & Luisa Meroni. 2001. The acquisition of disjunction: Evidence for a grammatical view of scalar implicatures. Proceedings of the 25th Boston University conference on language development (BUCLD), 157–168. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Guasti, Maria Teresa, Gennaro Chierchia, Stephen Crain, Francesca Foppolo, Andrea Gualmini & Luisa Meroni. 2005. Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures. Language and cognitive processes 20 (5), 667–696. Guasti, Maria Teresa. 2017. Language acquisition: the growth of grammar, second edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.