IAS Fellow at Ustinov College, Durham University (October – December 2018)

Dr Joanne Arciuli is an Associate Professor and Leader of the Children, Families, and Disability Stream within the Centre for Disability Research and Policy in the Faculty of Health Sciences at The University of Sydney, Australia.

Dr Arciuli’s PhD in Psycholinguistics was conferred by Macquarie University, Australia, in 2004. Her interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic program of basic and applied research spans Psychology, Linguistics, Neuroscience, and Speech-Language Pathology. She is a leading authority on typical and atypical child development in the areas of speech, language, literacy, and learning – especially an implicit form of learning known as statistical learning. She utilises a wide array of methods including corpus analyses, behavioural testing, brain imaging (fMRI, PET), EEG, and computational modeling. She has published research in English, Italian, Japanese, Greek, Dutch, German, Spanish, and Norwegian. Her research on children with developmental disabilities includes individuals with hearing impairment, apraxia of speech, Down syndrome, and also autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

Dr Arciuli has received external funding under highly competitive schemes administered by the Australian Research Council (ARC) – 6 grants as Chief Investigator. These include a distinguished 4-year mid-career research fellowship with a 16% national success rate that was undertaken 2014-2018. Some of her research has been bilaterally funded by the ARC and ESRC (UK). She has published over 70 journal papers in highly regarded journals such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Cerebral Cortex, Child Development, Developmental Science, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Cortex, Cognition, Neuropsychologia, and Brain and Language.

She is Associate Editor for Reading and Writing and for the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and is a member of the Editorial Boards of Scientific Studies of Reading and First Language. She edited a book on Communication in Autism under the Trends in Language Acquisition Research series (TiLAR) and has guest-edited three special issues of journals. She serves as a Director on the Board of the Luke Priddis Foundation, Australia, a not-for-profit organisation supporting families affected by autism. She is the International Coordinator on the Board of the Society for Scientific Studies of Reading (US headquarters) and a Director on the Board of the Association for Reading and Writing in Asia, ARWA (headquarters in Hong Kong). She was a Visiting Scientist in the Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Italy, (Sept, 2013), and a Visiting Scientist at Pennsylvania State University, US, (Oct/Nov, 2017).

During her IAS fellowship, Dr Arciuli will establish a collaborative research program with Dr Deborah Riby – Director of the Centre for Developmental Disorders research (CCD) at Durham and Director of Research in Department of Psychology. Together, Dr Arciuli and Dr Riby, along with other colleagues at Durham, will examine the link between statistical learning and sleep, and how this may affect language and literacy proficiency in children with ASD and Williams syndrome. This interdisciplinary research will be of interest to allied health clinicians, educators, psychologists/psychiatrists, researchers, parents, and others who work with children with developmental disabilities.