Research

Understanding how and where our brains store and activate the knowledge of the language (or languages) we have learned has been one of the major objectives in neurolinguistics.

My research aims to improve our understanding of the cognitive and neural processes that underlie language comprehension in both native and non-native speakers.

I employ a combination of brain measures -event-related potentials (ERPs) and Magnetoencephalography (MEG)- to examine the temporal and structural dynamics of brain activity while a person is reading in a first or a second language (Fig. 1).

An important goal of my research is to determine the extent to which grammatical processing in late second language learners may be similar to that of native speakers when reading for comprehension.

Additionally, I have examined whether lexical processing in one language is influenced by the presence of phonologically similar words from the other non-target language during visual word recognition.

I have also been investigating the neural sources associated with different processing stages in visual word recognition.