Research Lines

Besides GenPath, in GenLab our curiosity goes further into several other corners of psycholinguistics. Each of the lines below asks its own thing, but they all circle the same central question: how language, mind, and society meet in the head of the everyday speaker.

Grammatical Gender

Besides GenPath (check the About GenPath section), this line of research follows grammatical gender down a few other fascinating paths (at least for us!). One question we ask is how learners of Spanish lean on the little clues that nouns carry in their spelling. In Spanish, feminine nouns often end in -a and masculine ones in -o. But does a learner benefit from these clues in the same way, no matter the language they grew up with? We compare learners whose first language is Portuguese, which shares this transparent -a/-o logic, with learners whose first language is Polish, where gender works differently. The idea is to see whether the gender system you already carry in your head shapes how easily you pick up the orthographic cues of gender in a new one.

A second path is BridGe, a project on the gender of inanimate nouns (the gender of a table or a lamp, which tells us nothing about anyone's sex). Here we ask a delicate question: does our brain process masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns differently, and is that difference influenced by associated sexual stereotypes, and even by our ideas about sex, roles, and sexism? We compare Portuguese, a two-gendered language where the masculine–feminine dichotomy is very present, with German, a three-gendered language whose neuter value adds a welcome bit of balance to such a dichotomy. Our main question is whether a noun like gravata (the Portuguese word for tie, an accessory stereotypically associated with men) carries any processing disadvantage because it is feminine (a gravata, 'the tie') compared with a noun like saia ('skirt', stereotypically associated with women), which is also feminine (a saia, 'the skirt') but congruent with its stereotype. Using reaction times, we look for a cognitive asymmetry between gender values, and we ask whether it bends according to who is reading and what they believe about the sexed world.

Finally, good science needs to be replicable. A previous study of ours (Casado, Sá-Leite et al., 2023) hinted that men and women process gender differently, but its sample was small and its conclusions fragile. So we are running a large replication across 11 languages and 3 continents, to find out whether that effect is real and travels, or whether it was simply a statistical mirage. Together, these projects turn gender into a window onto how form, meaning, and society meet in the mind of the active speaker.

Language & Emotion

Language and emotion are so tightly intertwined in human experience that it is hard to imagine one without the other. Yet, we still don't fully understand how deeply they are entangled in the mind. This line of research asks an apparently simple question: when we read a word, does its emotional charge change the way our brain handles its grammar? We are part of a Spanish-based project that looks at exactly this, pairing grammar and emotion in the brain. Having first studied gender agreement in Spanish, we now turn to number agreement between subject and verb (a feature more loaded with meaning) to give emotion a better chance at leaving its mark. Using brain waves (ERPs) and response times, we test speakers across their first, second, and foreign languages (Spanish, Galician, and English), and we add something rarely considered: personality and mood. Does an unpleasant verb trip up agreement more for some people than for others, and does mood on the day tip the balance? We are now extending this design to speakers of German and to German–English bilinguals.

A second, purely behavioural study focuses on code-switching, that is, the everyday jump between two languages. German–English bilinguals see words one at a time and simply decide "word or non-word?", so emotion is never the point of the task. That is basically the trick: any effect of a word's positivity or negativity on switching between languages must be automatic, sneaking in without the participant even trying. We ask whether switching into a negative word costs more than switching into a happy or neutral one, and whether look-alike words shared by both languages (like Schock / shock) make the jump easier. Because German and English are cousins (both are Germanic languages), sharing script and vocabulary, they offer a rare chance to disentangle emotion, switching, and word similarity all at once. Together, these studies give us a richer picture of how feeling "kinda" colours the machinery of language.

Language & Negation

Negation means that, with a single word (not, nicht, no), we can flip the meaning of a whole sentence on its head. But how does the brain register that flip in real time, and what helps it along? This line of research, built on collaborations with the SFB and led in part by Golshan's work, listens closely to how negation is processed. One study asks a question that is easy to overlook: what role does the prosody of the voice play? When we speak, we don't just choose words; we stress, raise, and lower our voice, and that intonation can hint that a "no" is coming before the word itself arrives. Using electroencephalography (EEG) to track brain activity in real time, during speaking, we explore whether the rise and fall of speech helps listeners anticipate and integrate negation.

Other studies will compare languages like Spanish and German to unveil whether the difficulty our brain has in integrating negation comes from different sources depending on the syntactic structure of each language.

Language Comprehension in an AI-Mediated World

More and more of the language we read every day has passed through a machine. Chatbots draft our emails, translation tools rewrite our messages, and AI assistants summarise, rephrase, and autocomplete our thoughts. This raises a question that felt like science fiction only a few years ago: when so much of our linguistic diet is AI-mediated, does it change the way human minds understand language? This newest line of research steps back from any single grammatical feature to look at the bigger picture. We are curious about what happens to comprehension when the reading of texts for our academic and professional development is not done by us anymore, but by the machine we prompt.

Because this is a fast-moving and genuinely new territory, the project is being developed openly, with materials and plans shared on the Open Science Framework so that others can follow, reuse, and build on the work from the very start. That openness matters especially here: the technology is changing month by month, and the questions we are asking today may look quite different a year from now (after all, AI is constantly evolving). The broader ambition is to bring the careful tools of psycholinguistics (the same reaction times we use elsewhere) to dive into a question that now touches almost everyone's lives. As AI becomes an invisible layer between us and the language we consume, understanding how it reshapes comprehension is part of understanding the world we now live in.

Interested in any of these lines? Do you think we can collaborate? We'd love to hear from you! Contact us.