The Dussias BrainTracking Lab

In my research program, I have employed behavioral methods (reaction time and eye-tracking methodology) and ERPs to examine reading and spoken-language processing while bilinguals read sentences or hear utterances in one of their two languages. My students and I investigate whether language-specific information is largely kept independent when bilinguals compute initial syntactic structure for the sentences they read and hear, or whether information from one language influences decisions in the other language. Recent attention to the cognitive aspects of bilingualism has enhanced our understanding of the processes involved in processing a second language and of the consequences of knowing a second language for the putatively stable first language system. The knowledge to be gained from our research will contribute a more nuanced characterization of what it means to be a bilingual.