Center for Language Science at Penn State

The next installment in our CLS summer research features is the Second Language Acquisition Lab, directed by Dr. Carrie Jackson. One current project looks at how language processing is influenced by social and political circumstances among Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals living in Ukraine. When bilinguals encounter a word that is similar across their languages (e.g., English "potato" and Spanish "patata"), they often activate both of their languages--something called the "cognate effect". Dr. Jackson's lab is investigating whether this effect has changed for Ukrainian bilinguals, particularly those who have stopped using Russian since the beginning of the full scale invasion. To learn more about Dr. Jackson’s research group, please visit:

People | PSU Second Language Acquisition Lab People Carrie Jackson. I direct the SLA lab. I am currently a professor of German and Linguistics at Penn State University and the head of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. My main interests include psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and foreign language pedagogy...

The Center for Language Science (CLS) supports student research in a variety of ways. Romi Román Cabrera, a graduate student in Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, received funding from the CLS to support her dissertation research. Read on to learn about her interesting project and her experience as a CLS member.

You received an award from the CLS to support your dissertation research. Could you tell us a bit about your project?
- My project looks at how children and adults produce and understand subject pronouns in Spanish. For example, in a sentence like “Yasmin looks at Mabel, now she spins.” I am interested to see who people think “she” refers to, since it could be either Yasmin or Mabel. This question is especially interesting in Spanish since it is perfectly grammatical and systematic to say things like “Yasmin looks at Mabel, now spins”, omitting the pronoun "she". Spanish speakers may do this variably, and previous research on other types of Spanish has shown that whether or not the pronoun is pronounced can influence how the sentence is interpreted. My research is the first to explore this question in Dominican Spanish, and I am using techniques like eye tracking and asking people to produce sentences in order to investigate their patterns of pronunciation and interpretation.

What is something that you have learned through this research experience that you would like to share with the public?
- Sooo many things. Working with children is a fascinating world! If I had to share one thing it would be the importance of science communication, especially when you conduct research in a community where people might not be as familiarized with research or research practices. It is very important to speak about the project using accessible general audience language and be aware of one’s positionality as a researcher. Some people were a bit skeptical at first about the eye tracker and I had to find ways to explain what it does and its application from the real world so they would feel comfortable with it. One example that always helped was comparing it to the eye‑tracking technology used in gaming devices.

What are your next steps in this project?
- The immediate next step in this project is data analysis, as I'm now looking at the data I collected to see what sorts of patterns emerge. Further ahead, I would like to apply for a postdoctoral grant and expand this work with speakers of other Spanish dialects. One of the broader goals of my research is to contribute to a relatively small area of study that combines child language processing with dialectal variation.

How has being part of the CLS supported your research?
- Being part of the CLS has supported my research by giving me access to a strong interdisciplinary community, which has been especially valuable because my work draws on several areas, including child language acquisition, language development, cognition, and language variation. It has also given me opportunities to get early feedback on my project through conversations with invited speakers such as Dr. Elizabeth Schotter, Dr. Jorge Valdés Kroff, and Dr. Anne Beatty Martínez. In addition, seeing how other members present their work, learning about the kinds of projects they do, and hearing about the challenges they have faced in fieldwork has helped me think about my own research process and approach.

The Summer–Fall 2026 CLS/Bilingualism Matters Newsletter is now available! Check it out on our website at: https://sites.psu.edu/bilingualismmatters/summer-fall-2026/. This issue was developed by graduate research assistants Ingrid Chuang, Mackenzie Gentz, Yifei Gong, and Jie Yan, together with CLS Lab Manager Larisa Bryan, who chose to highlight the fascinating topic of heritage language users. Inside, you'll find an accessible introduction to heritage languages, a "Grammar Detective" feature that invites you to explore some of their unique linguistic patterns, and a look back at many of the exciting activities and accomplishments from the past academic year.

Special thanks also go to our summer research assistants, Alex Koch and Emily Herman, as well as Brittany Glunt, whose hard work formatting and preparing the newsletter made this publication possible. We encourage you to share the newsletter with others who may be interested, and we'd love to hear your questions, comments, or feedback. We hope you enjoy this latest issue—and that it makes for some enjoyable summer reading!

Summer/Fall 2026 Summer/Fall 2026 Dear friends and colleagues, Welcome to this issue of the CLS/Bilingualism Matters newsletter! This edition explores the fascinating world of heritage speakers and the creative ways bilingual experiences shape language use. Graduate students Mackenzie Gentz, Yifei Gong, Jie Yan, and...

The next lab in our summer spotlight series is The Augmentative and Alternatieve Communications (AAC) and Bilingualism Lab. This lab works to improve outcomes for individuals that use AAC to communicate in their daily life. This summer, the AAC Language and Bilingualism Lab at Penn State is conducting studies on language sample analysis in monolingual English, monolingual Spanish, and bilingual Spanish-English users of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) to better understand their expressive language use. For more information about current research project participation, contact Dr. Gloria Soto at [email protected]. For more information about the AAC lab, please visit: https://hhd.psu.edu/csd/research-aac.

Earlier in July, the CLS participated in the 2026 Kids Fest. Thanks to our wonderful volunteers and CLS team members, we were able to share different aspects of language science with kids through a variety of activities. Through face painting, kids learned vocabulary in languages around the world. They also learned through our multilingual Stroop task how, for skilled readers, reading words is an automatic process. And a Brain Doh activity gave them a glimpse of how language scientists use EEG to study the brain!

Next up in our summer lab features is The Language and Aging Lab at Penn State! This lab, directed by Dr. Michele Diaz, focuses on the neural infrastructure that supports the complex social and cognitive function that is language, and how this infrastructure changes as people age. This summer, the Language and Aging Lab is conducting neuroimaging research (EEG & MRI) on language and aging! We’re looking for monolingual younger adults ages 18-35 and monolingual older adults ages 60-89 years old. Sessions include computer tasks and an MRI or EEG task. Compensation is $15-$30/hour. If you would like to hear more, please email [email protected] or call us at 814-865-2912.

Learn more at:

Language and Aging Lab – Center for Language Science/SLEIC Center for Language Science/SLEIC

First up on our CLS summer lab features is the MultiGrammar Lab! This lab, directed by Dr. Matthew Carlson, investigates how knowing multiple languages impacts first and second language phonology and language use with experimental and corpus methods. In the Multigrammar Lab, one of the studies we are currently working on is about the production of code-switches involving English and Puerto Rican Spanish. We are recruiting speakers of Puerto Rican Spanish for a 60-75 minute session in our lab in Burrowes, in which participants will be recorded producing sentences and words in Spanish, and answering questions about their language background. Participants receive $20 upon completing the study. Please contact Dr. Carlson ([email protected]) if you are interested! For more information about the lab, please visit:

MuGlab: The MultiGrammar Lab - Center for Language Science While bilinguals can reliably use one language at a time when needed, it is clear that their two languages cannot be thought of as separate and independent systems coexisting in one mind, but rather a single “compound” system. We seek to understand what this means by exploring how the sound syst...

It's that time of year again--The Center for Language Science will be hosting a table on Children's Day at Arts Fest this Wednesday on July 8th, 2026. Rain or shine, stop by and learn about how language scientists study the brain and what kind of tasks linguists use in experiments. And don't miss our face-painting station where you can learn new words in different languages. We hope to see you there!

🍦It's summertime, and a lot is happening at the Center for Language Science! Our researchers are hard at work on an exciting range of projects exploring how language works across the lifespan. Here are just a few of the groups having fun with language science in our labs this summer:
The MultiGrammar Lab (Dr. Matthew Carlson): This lab is currently studying the production of code-switches involving English and Puerto Rican Spanish.
The Language Variation Lab (Dr. Frances Blanchette): This lab is working on a variety of projects related to language variation in American English.
The AAC Language and Bilingualism Lab (Dr. Gloria Soto): This lab is conducting studies on language sample analysis in monolingual English, monolingual Spanish, and bilingual Spanish-English users of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) to better understand their expressive language use.
The Acquisition of Variation Lab (Dr. Karen Miller): In this lab they are investigating how children acquire variable language forms in both English and Spanish.
The Language and Aging Lab (Dr. Michele Diaz): This lab is currently conducting neuroimaging research (EEG & MRI) on language and aging! They look at language use across time by collecting data with younger (18-35) as well as older (60-89) adults.
🔎This is just a slice of the exciting research happening across our community. For more information about our labs and research faculty, please visit: https://cls.la.psu.edu/research/. And stay tuned for information on how you can participate in the interesting studies happening in the CLS this summer!

Research - Center for Language Science