Evelina Leivada is an ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her focus is on language variation and bilingual development. She got her PhD in Cognitive Science and Language from Universitat de Barcelona in 2015. In 2017-2019, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at UiT-The Arctic University of Norway. Funded by the European Commission, she developed the project ‘Disentangling Variation’, which examined how variation in the linguistic input affects development in bilingual and bidialectal populations. In 2020, she joined Universitat Rovira i Virgili as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow, working on grammar processing in different groups of bilinguals. Among her recent achievements, her selection in the Aurora Outstanding Program (Tromsø Research Foundation & UiT) stands out. This initiative is available to the most outstanding young scholars in each discipline and trains them to become research leaders in their respective fields.
Research interests
Evelina is a psycholinguist. Her research brings together both the cognitive and the sociolinguistic aspects of the ability to acquire and use language through investigating of the effects of developmental trajectory on language and cognition. She specializes in bilingual development. More broadly, her research interests include language variation and how this affects the process of development, language acquisition in monolingual, bilingual, and bidialectal contexts, and theoretical linguistics. Supporting an interdisciplinary approach to language, Evelina is Associate Editor for Psycholinguistics in the Diamond Open Access journal Biolinguistics.
Selected publications
– Dentella V, Günther F & Leivada E 2023, ‘Systematic testing of three Language Models reveals low language accuracy, absence of response stability, and a yes- response bias‘, PNAS, 120, 230958312.
– Mitrofanova N, Leivada E & Westergaard M 2023, ‘Crosslinguistic influence in L3 acquisition Evidence from artificial language learning‘, Linguistic approaches to bilingualism, 13 – 5 – 717 – 742.
– Leivada E 2023 ‘A Classification Bias and an Exclusion Bias Jointly Overinflated the Estimation of Publication Biases in Bilingualism Research’. Behav. Sci. 13, 812.
– Leivada E, Rodríguez-Ordóñez I, Parafita Couto M C & Perpiñán S 2023, ‘Bilingualism with minority languages: Why searching for unicorn language users does not move us forward’. Applied Psycholinguistics, 1–16. Cambridge University Press. PII S0142716423000036.