Luisa Meroni is assistant professor at the Department of Modern Languages at Utrecht University. She studied Philosophy at the University of Milan where she graduated cum laude in Philosophy of Language in 1997. She went on to study Linguistics at the University of Maryland at College Park and received her Ph.D. in Linguistics with a dissertation on language acquisition entitled "Putting Children in Context' in 2005. After spending one year at MIT as visiting scholar and two years at McGill University as a Postdoc, she began to work at Utrecht University first as a researcher with a Marie Curie grant and then also as assistant professor. Her research focuses on three areas of Language:  child language acquisition, sentence processing and second language acquisition. In the field of child language development she has conducted many experiments investigating  young children's knowledge of constraints on the semantic properties of linguistic expressions, in particular, logical expressions such as disjunction and operators, such as 'every' and 'only.' In other research she has studied how children and adults resolve syntactic and semantic ambiguities that arise in language processing, a project for which  she received an European Science Foundation (ESF) grant for two years. Being a second language learner herself, she recently started to study the processes and factors underlying second language learning with special emphasis on those structures that are ambiguous in one language but not in the other. The overarching theme of her research is the use of linguistic theories and experimental tools to investigate language acquisition and processing.