Alba Tuninetti

Former Graduate Student
Post-doctoral Fellow
MARCs Institute
University of Western Sydney

Email: alt63 AT pitt DOT edu

I received my BA in cognitive science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. While there, I worked in an infant language acquisition laboratory, sparking my interest in language early on. As a bilingual, I became interested in bilingualism and second language learning, leading me to work with Dr. Natasha Tokowicz at the University of Pittsburgh and Center for the Neural Bases of Cognition. I completed my Master’s in 2012, examining syntactic processing in native Arabic and native Mandarin speakers learning English with eye-tracking. I shifted gears for my dissertation, in which I examined the mismatch negativity (MMN) response with event-related potentials (ERPs) with respect to non-native speech perception. I trained native English and native Spanish speakers on Hindi phonemes, examining the interaction between training, feedback, and cross-linguistic similarity and its effect on neural and behavioral responses. Currently, I have accepted a post-doctoral fellowship at the MARCs Institute at the University of Western Sydney, continuing to work on the neural and behavioral bases of second language speech perception in adults.