Christian Navarro-Torres

I am currently a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Irvine working with Judith Kroll. I received my M.S. in cognitive psychology at Penn State University, where I also worked with Paola Dussias.

I use a combination of behavioral, eye-tracking, and electrophysiological (EEG) methods to examine cognitive control recruitment during language processing. A great deal of research has investigated how bilinguals’ two languages interact with one another, but we know less about the cognitive mechanisms that enable bilinguals to function in one language at any given moment. A major goal of my research program is to understand the conditions in which bilinguals dynamically engage domain-general cognitive resources to optimize processing and fluency when speaking or comprehending words/sentences in one of their languages. In recent work, I have focused on studying variation in language use and language processing to identify aspects of bilingual experience that may create novel ways for how cognitive control is utilized by the brain.