Developed in collaboration with Dr. Daniel Schmidtke (McMaster University), this project investigates how Portuguese–English bilinguals process motion events in their second language (English) and whether reading behavior reflects conceptual patterns from their L1. Using a self-paced reading paradigm that contrasts English-typical (satellite-framed), Portuguese-typical (verb-framed), and hybrid structures, the study examines real-time integration of MANNER and PATH. With data from over 120 participants and advanced mixed-effects modeling, we test how proficiency and conceptual transfer shape reading speed and integration effort. The findings inform theories of linguistic relativity and second-language acquisition, showing when and how conceptual restructuring emerges during L2 reading.

This project, developed in collaboration with Dr. Victor Kuperman (McMaster University), investigates how readers process authentic Brazilian Portuguese texts from different genres — journalistic, popular science, and literary — using eye-tracking measures. By combining naturalistic reading data from the RastrOS corpus with over 200 linguistic metrics from NILC-Metrix, we aim to identify which textual features influence reading effort and how genre shapes cognitive processing during reading. Preliminary findings reveal distinct genre-specific reading strategies and highlight the importance of lexical frequency, surprisal, and discourse structure in shaping readers’ moment-by-moment processing. This research contributes novel insights into discourse processing and advances psycholinguistic models of reading in Portuguese.


Past project

This was my doctoral research and examined how Brazilian speakers of Portuguese conceptualize motion events when speaking English as a foreign language. Using experimental production tasks with 105 participants, the study compared monolingual and bilingual groups to investigate whether bilinguals’ mental representations in English are influenced by their native language. The findings revealed strong evidence of conceptual cross-linguistic influence, with bilinguals frequently using Portuguese-like motion patterns in English. Importantly, higher-proficiency speakers demonstrated conceptual restructuring, adopting English-typical patterns and producing hybrid forms that reflect uniquely bilingual cognition. This work is one of the first to document conceptual transfer between Portuguese and English and provides a novel empirical framework for studying how language shapes thought in bilinguals.