Rate My Professor Xu Rattanasone

Nan Xu Rattanasone is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. She holds the positions of Director of Research Training, Director of the Child Language Lab, and research lead on the Communications stream at the Macquarie University Hearing Research Centre. She completed her PhD in Psychology at the MARCS Institute of Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, in 2009. Following a postdoctoral position at Western Sydney University from 2009 to 2010, she joined Macquarie University as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2011, progressing to her current senior lecturer role. Her research examines the language and emerging literacy development of young bilingual children and children with hearing loss, addressing implications for school readiness and atypical language development. She utilizes behavioral methods including infant perception paradigms, eyetracking, and speech production analyses to study early bilingual development in typologically diverse languages such as Mandarin and English.

Nan Xu Rattanasone has obtained research funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, NSW Department of Education, and philanthropic organizations, including the Dr Li Sze Lim mobility scholarship and an NHMRC Ideas grant. She supervises PhD students investigating bilingualism, hearing loss, inflectional morphology, lexical tone, and cognitive development. Additionally, she teaches Language Acquisition in the undergraduate Speech and Hearing Sciences program and units on evidence-based practice and student research projects in the postgraduate Master of Clinical Audiology program. Her scholarly impact is evidenced by over 1,471 citations on Google Scholar. Notable publications include "Maternal input, not transient elevated depression and anxiety symptoms, predicts 2-year-olds' vocabulary development" (Journal of Child Language, 2026), "Due to increased variability, the expanded vowel and tone space in Mandarin IDS does not lead to enhanced contrasts" (Journal of Child Language, 2025), "'Panda' or 'Bear, cat': Mandarin-speaking preschoolers use duration and pitch to distinguish compounds and lists" (Journal of Child Language, 2025), "Investigating the effects of speaking rate on spoken language processing in children who are deaf and hard of hearing" (Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2025), and "Five-year-olds' Acoustic Realization of Mandarin Tone Sandhi" (Frontiers in Psychology, 2018). She contributes to multidisciplinary efforts through affiliations with the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders and the HEARing Cooperative Research Centre.