Nan Xu Rattanasone

Nan Xu Rattanasone's research focuses on Language Acquisition in children. This includes monolinguals, bilinguals, and those with hearing loss, as well as adult second language learners. She is 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. Her 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, her work has helped develop language assessments especially designed for bilingual preschoolers measuring their early language abilities.  

She received her PhD in Psychology from the MARCS Institute of Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney in 2009. Since then she has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow 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. She is currently the Deputy Director of the Child Language Lab, a member of the Macquarie University Centre for Language Sciences and had been an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders.