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StaffPaola DussiasBilingualism
Penn State
 Dr. Paola Dussias received her Ph.D in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Arizona in 1997. She is currently an Associate Professor of Spanish, Linguistics and Psychology at Penn State University. Her main research interest is on bilingual sentence processing. The central question of her research is whether language-specific information is largely kept independent when second language speakers compute an initial syntactic structure for the sentences they read, or whether information from one language influences processing decisions in the other language. She studies this issue by looking at second language readers when reading in one of their two languages and when they code-switch (i.e., when they alternate between two languages within a single utterance).
Currently, she is collaborating with Dr. Pilar Piņar (Gallaudet University) on a project funded by an NSF supplement grant to Reading and speaking words in two languages: A psycholinguistic approach to bilingualism (Judith F. Kroll, principal investigator; Paola Dussias, Chip Gerfen and Pilar Piņar, Co-Investigators). Specifically, the project examines how the grammatical relations between an individual's first language (L1) and second language (L2) interact while reading in English, their L2. The project is being carried out with deaf native signers, L1 Spanish speakers, L1 Chinese speakers, L1 Russian speakers, and monolingual English speakers.
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