Language – in all its different aspects - fascinates me. Linguistics is not simply my professional core-business; it is a never-ending curiosity and interest involving all contexts of my life.

My background in formal linguistics (Generative Grammar) provided me with the tools for a critical and analytical attitude towards the study of language. From this perspective, I address both theoretical and applied issues in various areas of (empirical) research. My interests include second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and intercultural communication. In this way, I learned to appreciate and integrate different methodologies, which I apply in my teaching and in my research. I enjoy tackling complex formal questions concerning language structure and interpretation. At the same time, I engage in projects and activities that may contribute solving societal issues.

Testing Language Comprehension
My current area of research concerns (second) language development and tools to measure it in a fair and ecologically-valid way. All the activities in this area are the result of joint work with Shalom Zuckerman, expert in psycholinguistics and first language acquisition. In 2015, we developed the Coloring Book, a new, digital method to assess language comprehension (Pinto & Zuckerman, 2018). For children, this is a funny coloring game. For researchers, it is a valid method to assess children’s language comprehension. See the Coloring Book Website at https://coloringbook.wp.hum.uu.nl/ for more details.

Based on the Coloring Book method, we then created KleurenSchat, a digital instrument for the observation of Dutch receptive vocabulary in elementary school children: https://coloringbook.wp.hum.uu.nl/kleurenschat/. KleurenSchat was published in 2020 by Boom Uitgevers Amsterdam and can be accessed through Boom’s digital test center.

Nederlands voor Alle Kinderen
In September 2021, we launched a new project: Nederlands voor alle kinderen, partly crowd founded and partly supported by refugees and migrant organizations. The aim of NvAK is to create a tool that tracks and measures second language development in young newcomers (refugees, asylum-seekers, work migrants), while considering both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors typical of this population. At present, no such an instrument is available to assess the linguistic development of these children. See our website https://coloringbook.wp.hum.uu.nl/nederlands-voor-alle-kinderen/ and the short movie we recorded in the Taalschool Utrecht to promote this project:

Knowledge Dissemination & Community Engaged Learning
In addition to linguistic research, I am committed and passionate in knowledge dissemination, particularly in the field of children's bilingual education and second language acquisition. I am actively engaged in sharing research-grounded information (presentations, workshops) with people outside academia, i.e. newcomers, bilingual families and professionals working in the multilingual/multicultural field.

I also believe in the importance of community engaged learning (CEL). In my teaching, I address societal issues requiring linguistic expertise and I have my students practice in providing theory-informed analyses and solutions. In collaboration with Monica Jansen, expert in literature and culture, I conducted two CEL projects within the curriculum of Italian Studies (UU): Heritage Storytelling and Bidirectional Storytelling. Both projects were granted seed money from the Humanities (UU) and were conceived as a collaboration between migrants and migrants’ organizations (ACLI in the Netherlands and Centro Astalli Trento and Popoli Insieme Padova), students and teachers/researchers. The first project resulted in four short documentaries on first generation Italian migrants in the Netherlands. The second project reports – in podcast format - the experiences of five immigrants in Italy learning Italian as a second language (see: https://migrazionialplurale.sites.uu.nl/?lang=it .

These projects were amazing experiences that brought academia and real life much closer to each other.