My research program focuses on the cognitive nature of bilingualism, with a specific
emphasis on reading processes. My most recent studies have examined how it is that
bilinguals resolve the lexical ambiguities that arise when one is proficient in more than
one language. For example, there are many words that across languages are seemnigly
similar but in fact map on to very different meanings. Now that there is abundant
evidence that bilingual cannot simply turn off one of their languages, researchers need
to address how it is that bilinguals handle the competition from multiple languages and
eventually correctly identify and comprehend ambiguous words. (See Curriculum Vitae below
for more details.)

Articles

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On a different plane: Cross-language effects on the conceptual representations of within-language homonyms (with Ana B. Areas), (in press) Language and Cognitive Processes (2009)
 

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Cross-language mediated priming: Effects of context and lexical relationship (with Ana B. Areas Da Luz Fontes), Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (2008)
 

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Lexical representation of second language words: Implications for second language vocabulary acquisition and use (with Li-Hao Yeh and Moira P. Shaw), Journal of the Mental Lexicon (2008)
 

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Using cognates to investigate cross-language competition in second language processing (with Gretchen Sunderman), TESOL Quarterly (2008)
 

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Reading words in Spanish and English: Mapping orthography to phonology in two languages (with Judith F. Kroll and MIchele Diaz), Language and Cognitive Processes (2007)
 

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Contributions to Books

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Language comprehension in bilingual speakers (with Judith F. Kroll), Handbook of Psycholinguistics (2007)
 

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National Standards and the diffusion of innovation: Language teaching in the USA, Interpreting communicative language teaching: Contexts and concerns in teacher education (2002)
 

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Curriculum standards in the foreign languages (with P C. Duo and M Djamou), Curriculum standards: National and Pennsylvania perspective (1999)
 

Submitted for Publication

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Bilingual lexical disambiguation in context: The role of non-selective cross-language activation (with Li-Hao Yeh and Ana B. Areas Da Luz Fontes) (2009)
 

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Working memory influences on cross-language activation during bilingual lexical disambiguation (with Ana B. Areas Da Luz Fontes) (2009)