Ana Rita Sá Leite was keynote speaker in Valencia!

I had the honor of giving my first keynote at the XV SEPEX & II Joint SEPEX–BAPS Meeting at the University of Valencia, which brought together the Spanish Society of Experimental Psychology (SEPEX) and the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences (BAPS). The invitation came with the SEPEX Emerging Research Talent Award, which I received this year.

My talk, Disentangling grammatical gender across languages, cultures, and speakers, started with Mark Twain, who joked that mastering German gender requires "a memory like a memorandum book." More than a century later, gender still puzzles learners and psycholinguists alike - and here we are, in GenLab, trying to solve these puzzles!

I presented the six questions that have guided my research from my PhD to GenLab: when gender is selected during lexical access, whether it is retrieved even when no agreement is needed, whether masculine and feminine are processed alike, whether gender can be computed from a noun's form, how two gender systems coexist in the bilingual mind, and whether social biases can reach grammatical processing. I closed by explaining how this path led to my Emmy Noether project on the neural signatures of gender retrieval across languages.

Many thanks to SEPEX and BAPS for the invitation, and to everyone who came with questions!