Bio

I am currently an associate professor at the Universidad Loyola Andalucia (Spain). My research interests lie in the mental processes involved in successfully learning a second language. I use behavioral, neurophysiological and neuroimaging methods to seek the factors that predict the achievement in language learners.

I got my PhD from the University of Granada, in the program of Experimental Psychology and Behavioral Neurosciences. The department of Experimental Psychology at the UGR and the Memory and Language lab led by my mentor, Prof. Teresa Bajo were an excellent ground to learn from an inspiring and outstanding group of researchers. For my dissertation I explored the phenomenon of forgetting as a result of suppressing competing memories. Here I also started studying bilinguals as a group susceptible to dealing with forgetting in the context of competing languages. After that, I moved to Castellón to gain expertise in brain imaging thanks to the Neuropsychology and Neuroimaging group at the University Jaume I, directed by César Ávila and subsequently, I earned a national fellowship to work with Prof. Sonja Kotz at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. These last two research experiences consolidated my focus on bilingualism and second language learning.

Between 2012-2017, I worked in Prof. Dussias’ lab at the Pennsylvania State University, using event related potentials (ERPs) to explore different aspects of native and non native sentence comprehension in Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals.