María J. Arche

María J. Arche obtained a PhD in Theoretical Linguistics & Language Acquisition under the supervision of Tim Stowell (University California Los Angeles) and Violeta Demonte (Autonomous University of Madrid). She later on held an ESRC postdoctoral position at the University of Southampton and visiting scholarships at the Universities of Massachusetts Amherst, Groningen and Tromsø.

María does research in the (morpho)syntax-semantics interface, to understand the correspondences between forms and meaning in language. She studies the elements languages have to convey information about time (tense and aspect) across categories (verbs, but also nouns and adjectives). Maria has investigated these topics in the grammar of Spanish and also their acquisition and crosslinguistic variation, publishing works that capture empirical data from large sets of languages and detailed theoretical analyses.

She has been a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study (NIAS) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in 2021-2022 and 2024, as coordinator of a NIAS-Lorentz theme-group and individually. María also serves as the secretary of the British Committee for Linguistics in Education (CLiE).

Since 2018 she has created initiatives to increase the understanding of language difficulties across populations. Outcomes of this work include the ATLAS Manifesto Think Language First, launched at the House of Lords in January 2024 in partnership with the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapy.

María Arche is the Chair of the transnational EU COST Action Justice to Youth Language Needs, which comprises linguists, speech and language therapists as well as legal, health and youth justice professionals from over 30 countries. The platform is set to address the compromised access to justice of (young) people because of their un-identified language needs, create effective language assessments and improve awareness across services.