Andrea Santana Covarrubias

PhD. in Linguistics

Associate Professor

Pontificia Universidad Católica De Valparaíso

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Andrea Santana Covarrubias

PhD. in Linguistics

Associate Professor

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso

About me

I was born in Santiago, Chile, but I was adopted from the fifth region of Valparaíso in 2008, the year in which I arrived in Valparaíso to obtain a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (PUCV). I obtained this degree in 2010 under the supervision of Romualdo Ibáñez Orellana, who was my master’s thesis director. Four years later, after being awarded the scholarship Becas-Chile Doctorate Abroad, I decided to live in the Netherlands to obtain a degree of Doctor in Linguistics. That is how I came to Utrecht Institute of Linguistics UiL-OTS of Utrecht University, and Ted Sanders, Wilbert Spooren, and Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen were the promoters of my Ph.D research. Finally, I got the degree of Ph.D. in Linguistics in 2019.

Currently, I live in Viña del Mar. I am an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literature and Language Sciences (ILCL), specifically in the Department of Translation and Interpretation. I teach undergraduate courses in Spanish and Communication Pedagogy and English-Spanish Translation. Furthermore, I work as a researcher by leading a FONDECYT Postdoctoral Research project. My research interests focus on the coherence, comprehension, and processing of written discourse in general and specialized fields.

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Ongoing research projects

2021-2023

Postdoctoral FONDECYT Project n°3210252: The cumulative cognitive complexity hypothesis: An approach from the Spanish language and through an ontogenetic perspective. Principal Researcher: Andrea Santana C

Objective: To determine the effect of the discursive characteristics of coherence relations and the age of the participants on their comprehension and processing. To this end, we evaluate the comprehending and processing of coherence relations of greater and lesser complexity. Moreover, we compare the subject’s performance at different stages of human development (children, adults, and older adults) in processing and comprehending such relations.

Method: Two experiments are carried out. One of them corresponds to the application of cloze tests that will allow us to identify the comprehension achieved by the subjects when facing coherence relations of higher and lower complexity. The second one corresponds to the recording of eye movement tracking, which will allow us to investigate in detail the processing and comprehension of the relations that were more difficult to understand in the previous experiment. Furthermore, from the latter, it will be possible to deepen into the performance of each age group.

2020-2023

Regular FONDECYT Project n°1201440: Primary Education School Texts: a proposal with psycholinguistic validity to account for their readability. Principal researcher: Romualdo Ibáñez O.  

Objective: to automatically classify the texts corresponding to the Genres of Knowledge (GCOs) used in school textbooks for sixth, seventh and eighth grade, in the subjects of Natural Sciences, Language and Communication, and History and Geography and Social Sciences, according to their readability. To achieve this objective, we propose to carry out a two-stage study, which integrates corpus linguistics, psycholinguistic research, and machine learning.

Method: In a first stage, a set of experimental and corpus-based psycholinguistic works are carried out to obtain concurrent empirical evidence regarding the linguistic features at lexical, syntactic and discourse level that best predict the readability of the texts used to communicate knowledge in the different subjects studied. Subsequently, and using the level of difficulty assigned to each text, together with the features validated psycholinguistically during the first stage, an automatic model for evaluating the difficulty of the texts will be trained. Finally, and after the necessary adjustments, the model will be validated by comparing its performance with existing readability formulas.

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