Ludovica Serratrice is Senior Academic Research Leader in Multilingualism and Inclusive Education. Her work focuses on language comprehension and production in multilingual learners, and on the cognitive and linguistic mechanisms that underpin the representation and use of multiple linguistic systems across development.
Ludovica’s research programme addresses the nature of multilingual language representations and the processes that give rise to cross-linguistic influence. A central strand of this work addresses the architecture of the multilingual mind and the mechanisms of language learning and use. Using the structural priming paradigm this research examines the extent to which syntactic representations are shared across languages, and seeks to identify the conditions under which activation in one language affects processing and production in another. In parallel, Ludovica’s research examines inferential processes in listening and reading comprehension, including how children generate inferences when engaging with narrative and expository texts in the language of schooling, and the linguistic and cognitive factors that support successful comprehension.
She has worked extensively on pragmatic development, with a particular focus on the comprehension and production of referential expressions. She investigates how multilingual children use linguistic expressions to manage reference in discourse, and how they integrate morphosyntactic and discourse-pragmatic information in contextually appropriate ways.
Ludovica is part of the team that developed the Q-BEx questionnaire, a tool designed to capture children’s multilingual language and literacy experiences in a systematic and accessible way. The questionnaire grew directly out of the need, in both research and practice, for more reliable and comparable ways of characterising children’s language backgrounds. It is now used to support both empirical research—by providing fine-grained measures of input and experience—and applied work in educational and clinical contexts, where understanding a child’s linguistic environment is essential for appropriate assessment and support.