She subsequently enrolled for doctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh, where she obtained her PhD in linguistics in 2000 for a thesis entitled Polysemy and metaphor in perception verbs: a crosslinguistic study, supervised by Ronnie Cann and Jim Miller.
[2][3] Between 1999 and 2001 she held a postdoctoral position at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Eve Sweetser and Dan Slobin, while also collaborating as a visiting researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley.
Simultaneously, from 2002 to 2003 she worked as assistant professor at the University of the Basque Country.
[1][2][4] In 2003, Ibarretxe-Antuñano took up a position as assistant professor at the University of Zaragoza, where she has been working in teaching and research ever since.
[1][5] Her published research deals with such topics as lexicalization, polysemy, iconicity, ideophones, and the interrelationships between metaphor, embodied cognition and culture.