Joanna started her PhD in Linguistics under the supervision of Hanneke Loerts, Merel Keijzer, and Anja Schüppert at the CLCG of the University of Groningen in October 2019. She graduated from the Research Master Language and Cognition at the University of Groningen in September 2018 and held various research and teaching assistantships at the University of Groningen between September 2018 and June 2019. Among others, she was a research assistant for Merel Keijzer and helped in research-related tasks and in coordinating the BALAB.

Being a simultaneous bilingual of German and Italian, having lived in five different countries during her studies, and holding a BA in Nordic linguistics, her big passions are everything that is concerned with multilingualism and travelling. Joanna’s fields of expertise are investigating the bilingual mind with psycholinguistic methods such as EEG and self-paced reading, language typology, Germanic/Nordic linguistics, basic statistics in R for linguists, and the investigation of sociolinguistic phenomena.

Project

Joanna's PhD project investigates how language typology categorization affects bilinguals’ general cognition and subconscious concepts. By using psycholinguistic methods like self-paced reading

or the event-related potential technique, this project will investigate how typological categorization influences the bilingual mind and how implicit mental processes are modulated by certain social factors. Another goal of this project is to investigate how learning a second language that is typologically similar to the first language versus learning a typologically very distinct second language affects the cognitive abilities of theory of mind and metalinguistic awareness.