Hi! My name is Maria Vender and I’m a psycholinguist and Associate Professor in Educational Linguistics at the University of Verona (Italy). I am currently coordinating the Verona Unit of the project entitled Reading Comprehension in Fragile Literacies (REACH; PRIN PNRR 2022), with the aim of analyzing the processing of linguistically demanding structures in text comprehension. Exploiting eye-tracking technology, our purpose is to explore reading comprehension in typically developing children, children with developmental dyslexia and bilingual children with L2 Italian and migrant background.
I am also working on a project titled “A Technology-Driven Linguistic Intervention for Children with Language and Literacy Weaknesses,” which aims to develop a targeted intervention to enhance reading skills in children with dyslexia and assess its effectiveness.
My research interests cover the domain of language acquisition and language teaching in both typical and atypical contexts, focusing in particular on the linguistic and cognitive competence of individuals suffering from language or learning disorders (like Developmental Dyslexia and Developmental Learning Disorder) and of L2 learners and bilinguals.
More particularly, I am interested in understanding how first and second languages are acquired and processed in both typically developing children and impaired populations, which I believe can contribute to the development of more appropriate and inclusive teaching methods, as well as to the design of more refined diagnostic tools and intervention programs for the identification and treatment of reading and language disorders in both monolingual and bilingual children.
I received my PhD from the University of Verona in 2011 with the thesis “Disentangling Dyslexia: Phonological and Processing Impairment in Developmental Dyslexia“. From 2012 to 2013 I was involved as a postdoctoral researcher in a research project funded by the Fondazione Marica De Vincenzi, with the aim of studying the linguistic profile of preschool children acquiring Italian as a second language, with the aim of identifying possible differences and similarities with monolingual Italian children suffering from Specific Language Impairment. From 2014 to 2019 I worked as a main researcher in the European project AThEME (Advancing the European Multilingual Experience) focusing in particular on the interaction between developmental dyslexia, language impairments and bilingualism. As a follow up, from 2018 to 2019 I worked as postdoctoral researcher at the project “Identifying reading disorders in bilingual children with Italian as a L2”.
Since 2012, I collaborate with Bilinguismo Conta, Italian branch of the organization Bilingualism Matters founded to spread correct information about the importance of supporting bi-/multilingualism.
Since 2014, I am also member of the Lab LaTeC (Language, Text and Cognition) at the University of Verona, with the aim of investigating the linguistic and cognitive competence of individuals with typical and atypical development.
Maria Vender 