Alessandra Sansavini

Email: alessandra(dot)sansavini(at)unibo(dot)it

Dr. Alessandra Sansavini is Full Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Bologna (Italy), where she is Head of the Developmental Psychology Lab and the Research Group on Development of Communication, Language, Cognition and Relationships at the Department of Psychology. She is also the scientific coordinator of a follow-up program for preterm children in collaboration with the Unit of Neonatology of Bologna University Hospital. She received a Ph.D. in Psychology in 1994 from the University of Bologna, researching neonatal speech perception in collaboration with the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, CNRS-EHESS, Paris (France). She has been a visiting fellow at the University of Pittsburgh (USA), the University of Haifa (Israel), and the University of Sussex (UK), and responsible for international cooperation agreements.

Her research has mainly focused on the development of communication and language from early infancy to school age and early markers of language-learning impairment in children with typical, at-risk, and atypical development, with a particular focus on children born preterm and children with language impairment. She has also addressed relationships among communication, language, cognition, and motor development, caregiver-child interaction, language input, and their role in developmental trajectories. She has implemented interventions with parents promoting communication and language development. She utilizes a multi-method approach combining observational and experimental techniques (behavioral and eye tracking) and standardized tools to research these phenomena. Grants from the Italian Ministry of University and Research and the University of Bologna have primarily funded her work.

She is the author of 84 peer-reviewed journal articles, 33 book chapters, two volumes, and co-edited three volumes and three special issues in peer-reviewed journal articles. She has been associate editor of the journal Infancy (2018-2023) and is a member of the editorial board of the journals Child Language, Teaching and Therapy and Psicologia Clinica dello Sviluppo.

She has been a member of the Executive Board (2014-2019) and served as President (2019-2022) of CLASTA, the Italian Association of Communication & Language Acquisition Studies in Typical and Atypical populations.

She is a member of the European Topic Expert Group on Follow-up and continuing care of the EFCNI Standards of Care for Newborn Health Project, in which she contributed to the Communication, speech, voice, and language standards, being responsible for the writing group of experts. She is also a promoting member of a national panel of experts for the Italian Consensus Conference on Developmental Language Disorder, contributing to writing documents, recommendations, articles, and a volume.