People

I am specialized on Psycholinguistics, Bilingualism, and Gender. During my master thesis at the University of Granada (UGR) I found that the sex of speakers and addressees biased the activation of words, facilitating the processing of words matching in grammatical gender. These findings were presented in a national congress. Given my enthusiasm to continue exploring this topic I started a PhD with Prof. Paolieri also at the UGR. We continued exploring how sex and gender dimensions influenced language processing at different levels of awareness, with different modalities of presentation and varying the amount of semantic information related to sex marked by grammatical gender. We published two scientific papers (Casado et al., 2018; 2021), and attended 4 national and 3 international conferences to disseminate our results in 5 posters and 2 oral communications. During my PhD, I got a grant from the UGR to go abroad and get an international doctorate. I worked with Prof. Bruniellière at the University of Lille 3 (France) where we used electroencephalography (EEG) to explore at the neural level the impact of the sex of the speaker on the activation of male and female referents. The results of this project were presented in an international conference and a scientific paper (Casado & Brunellière, 2016).

After my PhD I continued working at the UGR with Prof. Paolieri in collaboration with Prof. Ferré, from the University Rovira i Virgili (Spain). We designed an EEG study to explore the neural correlates of gender congruency between languages. We found that bilinguals easily accessed words whose translation equivalent were gender congruent vs. gender incongruent. The results of the study were presented in an international conference and a scientific paper (Casado et al., 2023).

Later, I worked at the Jagiellonian University (Poland) with Prof. Wodniecka for 3.7 years as a postdoc. I was involved in a large project with bilinguals studying the effects on the native language of short-term and long-term immersion in a second-language environment. I used my expertise in EEG and mixed-effect models to analyze data and design new studies. I supervised a master student and taught some statistics courses. I had the opportunity to collaborate with researchers from different universities (e.g., Prof. Sorace, Edinburgh University (UK)). We published our work in high-impact journals (Casado et al., 2023; 2022; Wodniecka et al., 2020) and went to international conferences.

During my return to the UGR I worked with Prof. Paolieri in collaboration with Prof. Pesciarelli from the University of Modena (Italy). We investigated the neural correlates of the gender-congruency effect in Spanish (e.g., facilitated activation of gender congruent information), and the role of the masculine form as the generic gender in formal gender languages. Moreover, we explored how other variables like gender-role or sexist behavior that could modulate the strength of gender-congruency effect (Casado et al., 2023). I supervised an undergraduate student and a master student on their theses.

Currently, I am part of a new project in which together with Prof. Paolieri we investigate the pervasive neural and behavioral effect of grammatical gender with bilingual population in production and comprehension. Furthermore, we recently opened a new line of research in collaboration with Prof. Muelas from the University Autonoma of Madrid (Spain) to explore the alternative forms of gender desinence to describe people with the intention to create a language use guideline.

Despite having an established line of research, I have collaborated with other researchers in different topics related to language, like language learning (García-Gámez et al., 2021), collocation processing (Otwinowska et al., 2021), or dialect use (Masullo et al., 2024).

Given my expertise, I have been a member of five different research projects, involved in the process of generating ideas and designing new experiments. Moreover, I have extensive experience reviewing scientific papers from different high-impact journals (e.g., Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Brain Research, Cognitive Science, Frontiers in Psychology, Glossa, Linguistics, Studies in Second Language Acquisition), and I was an international reviewer for a doctoral thesis at the UGR.

Along this time, I was a member of the “Bilingualism Matters” association, whose goal is to demystify false beliefs about the bilingual population and spread the benefits of bilingualism. We work with nurseries, schools, parents’ associations, migrant associations, and we intend to reach a wider public with traditional and social media. In Poland I was part of a project to disseminate scientific knowledge where I gave some talks to high-school, undergraduate, and PhD students. Currently I continue disseminating scientific knowledge hosting high-school students in our lab and giving scientific talks in diverse events.