Access to Language and Cognitive Development

Among his books are Knowing Children: Experiments in Conversation and Cognition (second edition, Psychology Press, 1997), Children’s Understanding of Biology and Health (co-edited with C. C. Peterson, Cambridge University Press, 1999), The Cognitive Basis of Science (co-edited with P. Carruthers and S. Stich, Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Marvelous Minds: The Discovery of What Children Know (Oxford University Press, 2008). He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Academia Europaea.

Luca Surian is a Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Trento, Italy. Previously, he held appointments at the MRC Cognitive Development Unit in London (UK) and at the Departments of Psychology of the Universities of Padua (Italy), Trieste (Italy) and North Carolina, Greensboro, where he was supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. For many years, Professor Surian has been carrying out research on the development of language and cognitive processes, with a particular interest in the conceptual development and the acquisition of communicative competence both in typically developing children and in atypically developing children, such as those with autism and specific language impairment. His recent research concerns the development of cognitive processes in preverbal infants, monolingual and bilingual children and deaf children who either have deaf parents or hearing parents. Professor Surian’s research is represented in more than 80 scientific publications.