Paola Escudero received the Heineken Young Scientists Award for Cognitive Science 2010 for her research on second language speech learning.
Her PhD research at the University of Utrecht concerned phonological categories in polyglots. Paola Escudero has developed a model within the context of Optimality Theory that describes the cognitive processes that speakers go through when forming sounds that are unknown in their native language. As a postdoc, she is currently conducting psycholinguistic research in order to test her theoretical model experimentally. Paola Escudero works at the University of Amsterdam.