Brain Language and Bilingualism Lab

I am a post-doctoral researcher at the linguistics department affiliated with the Brain, Language and Bilingualism lab. I am interested in the cognitive processes underlying the interaction between languages in bilingual and multilingual speakers. I use behavioral and neurocognitive (EEG/ERP and eye-tracking) techniques to investigate cross-language interaction, cognitive control, and language production and comprehension. Some of my research topics fall in the following areas:

• The bilingual lexicon: I ask how the lexicon reorganizes itself when a language is added; whether words from different languages sharing linguistic features interact and interfere during processing in one language only or in a mixed language context; what consequences this interference has on the dominant and the later acquired languages.
• Language use: given that bilinguals/multilinguals vary in how they use their languages in daily interactions even at the individual level, I examine whether the way languages are used in certain contexts, separately or together (code-switching) affects (1) the activation and selection of lexical items; (2) the involvement of control processes (3) the consequences on cognitive control and (4) the adaptation of control processes to variation in language contexts.
• Information retrieval and structural dependency: I examine how readers store information and integrate it over time, what factors (e.g., proficiency, language dominance) affect whether the language system repairs or fails to repair errors during language comprehension.