Philippe Prévost is Full Professor of Linguistics at the Université of Tours and he integrates the UMR 1253 iBrain, Université de Tours, INSERM (Autism axis of the Neurofunctional Psychiatry team). His investigation focuses on the comparison between morphosyntactic development in different language acquisition contexts, notably in bilingual language acquisition and in impaired language acquisition, such as autism and developmental language disorders. In his work he addresses the role of computational complexity in language development. Together with other colleagues from the Université de Tours, he integrates the internation network of research labs that explore language abilities in autistic children (LACA, http://laca.humanities.uva.nl/wp/).
Roumyana Slabakova is Full Professor and Chair of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at the University of Southampton, UK, and is also adjunct Research Professor in the Department of Language and Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research is grounded in generative linguistic theory and explores the second language (L2) acquisition and the multilingual acquisition processes. Her theoretical focus is the acquisition of grammatical structure and its interaction with meaning. She has proposed the Scalpel Model, a model of third and additional language (L3/Ln) acquisition, which aims to identify and examine what happens beyond the initial state of acquisition and what factors may influence change from one state of knowledge to another.
Ana Lúcia Santos is Associate Professor with the academic title of aggregate (Professora Associada com Agregação) at the University of Lisbon, at the Linguistics Department (Faculdade de Letras), where she teaches Language Acquisition. She is also a researcher at Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa (CLUL). Her research interests include the acquisition of syntax in monolingual and bilingual settings. She has investigated the acquisition of VP ellipsis, among other topics, and was the leader of a research project on the acquisition of complement clauses, inflected infinitives and control.