Projects

Current projects

Title: Parallel Language Acquisition: Dynamic Assessment of Language Distance and Cognitive Control in Immigrant Contexts (PALADYN)

Funding: Spanish State Research Agency

Host institution: Instituto de Psicoloxía, University of Santiago de Compostela

Project duration: 09/2026-08/2030

Role: Principal Investigator

Brief project description: PALADYN investigates parallel language acquisition in immigrant children who, within the educational systems of Galicia and Valencia, learn two co-official languages (Galician or Valencian) in parallel with Spanish, alongside their home language and English as a foreign language. These bilingual territories provide “natural laboratories” for observing multilingual development under real educational conditions. The project responds to a pressing educational need: Spain’s increasingly multilingual classrooms require assessment practices that differentiate limited exposure or language distance effects from genuine developmental difficulties. PALADYN employs a longitudinal, four-year design that captures developmental trajectories and employs Dynamic Assessment (DA) as a method that measures children’s learning potential rather than static knowledge. To our knowledge, no previous project has jointly examined how language distance and executive functions shape the way immigrant children acquire two co-official school languages in parallel via dynamic assessment. By integrating linguistic, cognitive, and educational perspectives, PALADYN advances research in multilingual development while producing practical tools for equitable assessment in bilingual regions of Spain. Its outcomes will directly support inclusive, evidence-based educational practice.

Title: Multilingual Assessment and Well-Being in Children with Language Disorders (MULTI-WELL)

Funding: EUniWell

Host institution: Instituto de Psicoloxía, University of Santiago de Compostela

Project duration: 09/2026-08/2027

Role: Principal Investigator

Brief project description: MULTI-WELL is an international research project funded by the EUniWell Seed Funding Programme that explores the assessment experiences of multilingual children with language disorders and their impact on psychological well-being, communicative confidence, participation, and inclusion. Bringing together researchers from Spain, Germany, France, and Italy, the project aims to identify challenges in current assessment practices, explore children's perspectives, and promote more inclusive and linguistically sensitive approaches to language assessment and support.

Finished projects 

Title: Multilingual Acquisition and Processing: Heritage Russian in Spain

Funding: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA-PF)

Host institution: Center for Language, Brain & Learning, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway

Project duration: 09/2024-08/2026

Role: Principal Investigator

Brief project description: Recent research highlights a need for deeper understanding of the nature of language competence and the development of this  competence under heritage language bi- and multilingualism. Heritage speakers (HSs) is a population highly diverse in terms of their  linguistic competence and its development. Multilingual Acquisition and Processing (MAP) will provide an  examination of Russian Heritage Language (HL) grammar in a previously unstudied socio-linguistic context focusing in particular on  the patterns of cross-linguistic interaction at early and most unstable stages of multilingual language development. The overall  research objective is to discover the patterns of language acquisition and language processing in order to find out how multilingual  minds deploy their developing grammatical knowledge and how they detect and access the linguistic (morpho-syntactic)  mechanisms from their two co-existing languages ​in real-time. The proposed empirical study will investigate the effects of linguistic  proximity, individual experiential factors and the developmental patterns of cross-linguistic influence in child bilingualism. Heritage  Russian in Spain and Portugal will be studied with a focus on 3-11-year-old children and 12-18-year-old adolescents in order to examine developmental trajectories in both  languages. On the theoretical level, MAP will significantly contribute to the development of a model of heritage language grammar and add to a sub-field of multilingualism studies, Heritage Language Acquisition, by showing the patterns of cross-linguistic  interaction at early stages of multilingual Russian- Spanish and Russian-Portuguese development. On a societal and education level, project findings will be  relevant for policy makers, teachers, school principals and HSs communities in European countries. To date, most heritage language  studies have focused exclusively on the minority language, MAP will fill an important gap by focusing on both languages.

Other (not funded) projects 

• Reading, writing and EFs in preterm Spanish children

• Evitentiality and epistemicity in Spanish 

• Spanish as L2