Ellen Bialystok (York University, Canada) is a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at York University and Associate Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care. She obtained her Ph.D. in 1976 from the University of Toronto specializing in cognitive and language development in children. Her current research focuses on the effect of bilingualism on language and cognition across the lifespan showing modification in cognitive systems from this experience. Her research uses both behavioral and neuroimaging methods and examines participants who are children, younger or older adults, as well as patients. She has published extensively in the form of books, scientific articles, and book chapters. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and among her awards are the Canadian Society for Brain Behaviour and Cognitive Science Hebb Award (2011), Killam Prize for the Social Sciences (2010), York University President’s Research Award of Merit (2009), Donald T. Stuss Award for Research Excellence at the Baycrest Geriatric Centre (2005), Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research (2002), Killam Research Fellowship (2001), and the Walter Gordon Research Fellowship (1999). Further information.
Thomas Bak (U of Edinburgh, UK)
Researcher at the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences; expert on the relationship between language, cognition, and motor function. An article on which he is co-author (Alladi et al., 2013) has attracted attention as the first large-scale study of positive effects of bilingualism on delaying onset of dementia independent of education, occupation, and literacy.
Harald Clahsen (U of Potsdam)
Co-director of the Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism. Dr. Clahsen’s research has focused on developmental language disorders and grammatical processing in native speakers and language learners using psycholinguistic experimentation. In addition to multilingualism, grammatical processing, and language disorders, his research interests include theories of morphology and syntax. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the Academy of Europe.
Albert Costa (U Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
Research Professor in Social & Behavioural Sciences; expert in bilingual speech production and neuroimaging techniques. In 2012-2013, Dr. Costa’s group published 20 articles on the relation between bilingualism and executive control in young adults and patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
Randall W. Engle (Georgia Tech)
Professor of Psychology and Interim Director, Center for Advanced Brain Imaging; research focuses on memory capacity and its relationship to attention control. He has argued that individual differences in the construct measured as working memory capacity reflects differences in the ability to control attention to internally generated and externally elicited representations and that differences in this ability is an important component of general fluid intelligence (Engle & Kane, 2004).
Naomi Friedman (U of Colorado Boulder)
Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and Institute for Behavioral Genetics. Expert on individual differences in executive functions, including their phenotypic and genetic relations to other cognitive abilities, an author of several influential articles on executive function (e.g., Miyake & Friedman, 2012).
Virginia Mueller Gathercole (Florida International University)
Professor of Linguistics, expert on monolingual and bilingual language acquisition in relation to semantics, morpho-syntax, and assessment. Her work also addresses issues concerning the relationship between language and cognition. She specializes in the acquisition of English, Spanish, and Welsh in Spanish-English and Welsh-English bilinguals.
Lynn Hasher (University of Toronto, Canada)
Professor of Psychology and Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Centre; expert in gerontology research with a focus of the role that basic attentional processes play in the ability to understand language and remember events. Dr. Hasher’s recent publications address distraction, cognitive control, and suppression of interference in aging.
Raymond Klein (Dalhousie U, Canada)
University Research Professor at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience; expert in human performance and applied cognitive psychology; published the first paper (Hilchey & Klein, 2011) that found inconsistent evidence for the relationship between bilingualism and cognitive control.
Judith Kroll (Penn State)
Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Women’s Studies and Director of the Center for Language Science, editor of several books on bilingualism, PI on the NSF PIRE grant that has been developing an international network of training in bilingualism.
Klara Marton (CUNY Graduate Center)
Professor in Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences; expert on changes in language and cognition across lifetime, and interaction between inhibition, and attentional control. Marton et al. (2013) demonstrated that balanced but not L2 learning bilingual children outperformed monolinguals, but it was modulated by language proficiency.
Theo Marinis (University of Reading, UK)
Theo Marinis is Professor of Multilingualism and Language Development at the University of Reading. His research focuses on first and second language acquisition in typically developing children, children with SLI and children with ASD. Using a range of off-line and on-line experiments his research addresses the development of language processing across populations and the relationship between language and cognition.
Antonella Sorace (U of Edinburgh, UK)
Professor of Developmental Linguistics at the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences; expert on the reciprocal effects of bilingualism and general cognition; PI on numerous U.K. and European grants; the founder and Director of Bilingualism Matters, a network that promotes benefits of bilingualism for children.
Yaakov Stern (Columbia U)
Professor of Neuropsychology, Department of Neurology and Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer’s Disease and the Aging Brain; the author of the cognitive reserve theory in aging research (Stern, 2009). His team explores the factors that make older adults more resistant to cognitive decline as well as cognitive, behavioral, and neurological features that slow down progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
João Veríssimo (University of Lisbon, U of Potsdam)
Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Potsdam. Dr. Veríssimo’s research interests include lexical representation and morphological processing in native and non-native speakers. The larger theoretical questions that form the background for this work concern the debates between symbolic and associative models of language and cognition, the psychological reality of grammar, and the contrast between nativist and empiricist approaches to the origin of linguistic knowledge.
