Ianthi Maria Tsimpli works on language development in the first and second language in children and adults, language impairment, attrition, bilingualism, language processing and the interaction between language, cognitive abilities and print exposure. She recently held the positions of Professor of Multilingualism and Cognition at the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading and the positions of Professor of Psycholinguistics and Director of the Language Development Lab at the Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She holds a BA in Modern Greek Literature and Byzantine Studies from the University of Athens and a PhD in Linguistics from University College London (1992). Her doctorate thesis was published in 1996 in the series Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics, Garland with the title Functional Categories and Maturation: The Prefunctional Stage of Language Acquisition. She has extensively worked on the case of Christopher, a polyglot-savant, with Neil Smith (UCL) with whom she co-authored the book The Mind of a Savant: Language Learning and Modularity (1995, Blackwell) as well as a number of journal articles. A number of articles and book chapters co-authored with Neil Smith, Bencie Woll and Gary Morgan as well as the book "Signs of a Savant"(2010, CUP) have also been published on a subsequent research project investigating Christopher’s ability to learn British Sign Language.

Before moving to Cambridge, Professor Tsimpli taught Linguistics at University College London, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, University of Cambridge (Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics) and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. The Language Development Lab she founded and directed in Thessaloniki conducts research on first and second language development, bilingualism, SLI, Broca’s aphasia, native adult, child and L2 sentence processing and eye-movements. A large part of this research is externally funded through national and international research projects.

Professor Tsimpli held a ‘Guest of the Rector’ Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and the Social Sciences for six months in 2012, a Visiting Professorship for six months at the University of Cyprus in 2007 and a Visiting Scholar position at the Collaborative Research Centre on Multilingualism, at the University of Hamburg in 2005. She is Associate Editor of Lingua and member of the Editorial Board of the journals Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Second Language Research, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, Journal of Applied Linguistics, Biolinguistics (e-journal), Journal of Greek Linguistics and of the Book Series “Language Acquisition and Language Disorders”.