Arianna Compostella is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Milano-Bicocca, working on the project “A technology-driven linguistic intervention for children with language and literacy weaknesses” under the supervision of Prof. Maria Teresa Guasti. In this project, she works with a multidisciplinary research team that includes researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of Milano-Bicocca and from the i3Lab (Innovative, Interactive Interfaces Laboratory) at the Politecnico di Milano. Together, they develop innovative technological solutions based on solid theoretical principles from speech therapy and psycholinguistics to support children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The project leverages interactive storytelling to strengthen children’s morphosyntactic abilities. Stories are delivered through two formats: a tablet-based web application and the Magic Room—an immersive interactive multisensory space. By creating dynamic, engaging play-based scenarios, this approach fosters language development in a natural, fun, and immersive way.
Before joining the University of Milano-Bicocca, she received her PhD in Linguistics at the University of Verona under the supervision of Prof. Denis Delfitto and Prof. Maria Vender. Her doctoral dissertation is titled “Language and perception: Investigating linear and hierarchical implicit statistical learning across the visual, auditory, and tactile sensory domains”. Using the Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) paradigm, the study demonstrates that sequential statistical learning and the cognitive ability to form recursive hierarchical abstract representations from sequentially ordered stimuli work together as complementary learning processes, likely driven by a unique higher-order cognitive strategy: optimizing computation by reducing input complexity. The study also provides evidence that these abilities are not language-specific, but rather domain-general capacities present across various sensory modalities, potentially interacting with language in specific ways.
During her PhD, she was a visiting research student at the Centre for Language Evolution (CLE) at the University of Edinburgh, where she worked under the supervision of Prof. Jennifer Culbertson and Prof. Simon Kirby.
Prior to her doctoral studies, she obtained a MA in Linguistics from the University of Verona.
