I work in the areas of experimental cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistic relativity, bilingual cognition, language acquisition.

The main questions that guide my research concern language-driven human cognition and can be summarised as follows:

1. To what extent do speakers of different languages think and perceive the world differently?

2. To what extent does additional language learning transform the way we perceive the world?

Recent research programmes have looked at the effects of time metaphors on time perception, the relationship between grammatical aspect and event representation, the lexicalization of path, manner and causation of motion and motion event cognition, the effects of grammatical gender on object and face perception, the count/mass noun distinction and the construal of individuation, and the effects of colour and object terminology on categorical perception.

Picture credit: Kennet Ruona