Dr. Aline Ferreira
Associate Professor of Cognitive Linguistics and Hispanic Linguistics (Department of Spanish and Portuguese) at the University of California Santa Barbara and the director of Bilingualism, Translation, and Cognition Laboratory.
Affiliated Faculty at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of California Santa Barbara.
Main topics of interest: Written Translation, Oral Interpreting, Bilingualism, Heritage Languages, and Second Language Acquisition.
MY LATEST RESEARCH
For my current research related to Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism, my main interest is to exam cross-linguistic relations of L1 and L2 for language learners as well for heritage speakers. More specifically, I focus on reading comprehension in Spanish-English and Portuguese-English bilingual children. There are several factors that might influence cross-language relations among Spanish and English measures (e.g., age of acquisition of the L2, social status, among others). I became interested in analyzing Portuguese and Spanish acquisition in heritage speakers since I started to work as a Portuguese teacher and could perceive how language decoding can be more explored in the classroom in order to facilitate language reading for this particular group. In the future, because this group has already learned to read in English, the interference should be used as a facilitator instead of an obstacle.
In my research in Translation Studies, I have mapped the cognitive activities during a translation task (at the word, sentence, and discourse levels), investigating, among different aspects, competence in translation. I examine cognitive abilities from a cohort of professional translators, aiming to verify if there is a relationship between expertise in translation and a number of variables measuring, with eye tracker and key logging, conceptual/lexical processing, inhibitory control, and lexical robustness. I am also interested in investigating lexical decisions during translation at the word, sentence, and discourse levels in trilinguals (Portuguese, Spanish, and English speakers).