Welcome to my website

Here, I'd like to share my research ideas and findings.

My work explores how language, perception, and memory interact in the human mind. Specifically, I investigate how linguistic and sensorimotor experiences shape how we understand, remember, and relate to the world.

April Publications

April was a great month for publications!

I'm excited to share three new open-access papers.

1. Frequency over semantic richness: word recognition in non-native English speakers

I conducted a large-scale comparison of word knowledge in native and non-native English speakers. The study, published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, reveals key differences in sensorimotor and lexical contributions to language processing. In this task (data from Brysbaert et al. (2021) and Mandera et al. (2020)

Non-native speakers relied more on lexical characteristics and familiarity with the word form when responding to words, as evidenced by very strong effects of word frequency on speed and accuracy of their responses. On the other hand, native speakers relied more on deep semantic processing, as found in previous word recognition literature: the stronger the semantic information associated with a word, the easier and faster it was to recognise it as a known English word.

However, for non-native speakers there was still a contribution of physical sensation and auditory experience to reported word knowledge, suggesting that embodied cognition does play a role in second language processing to some extent. In particular, it's possible that bodily experience, with its importance for survival, has stable enough representations that activation still takes place in L2. As for the auditory information, it's possible that non-native speakers employ sound-based strategies to recognise words.

Additionally, the study revealed that a word knowledge task (asking if participants know the meaning of the word) seems to tap into similar mechanisms as lexical decision (determining whether the stimulus is a real word). This makes the megastudy a useful resource to add to the study of semantic effects in word recognition.

Writing this paper was a lot of fun (even though it was also hard work), since it was my first paper on L2 (and my first paper outside of the lab where I "grew up" as a scientist). I'm looking forward to another deep dive into semantic representations in L2 when writing my next paper on emotional word communication in EEG hyperscanning (stay tuned!).

2. Free word association is driven by local response chaining of linguistic and sensorimotor relationships

3. Sensorimotor effects in surprise word memory – A registered report