Camilla Masullo

PhD Programme: Cognitive Science and Language
Research group: ROLLING – Research on Language and Linguistics
Supervisors: Evangelia Leivada & Isabel Oltra-Massuet

Bio

Before starting the PhD at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, she studied at Università degli Studi di Pavia, where she got her BA in Lettere Moderne and her MA in Theoretic and Applied Linguistics. In her BA degree she had an Erasmus experience at Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, where she enriched her studies with courses of Spanish philology and history. During her Master's degree she had the opportunity to focus her studies in different Linguistics fields, especially in Sociolinguistics, Psycolinguistics and Language Acquisition. She also did a Traineeship in acquisition of Italian as second language at Asociación Dante Alighieri (Comité de Sevilla), where she could put in practice her theoretical knowledge about language learning and she could gather data for the second part of her MA project. Her MA thesis' project investigated the phenomenon of linguistic stereotypes about different varieties of Italian, a topic she also treated in her BA research. Her MA work put particular attention on the development of linguistic attitudes in native children of Italian and in learners of Italian as Second Language. She is now enrolled in a programme titled "Language processing and the bilingual mind", under the supervision of Professors Evelina Leivada and Isabel Oltra-Massuet. She is also member of the URV research group ROLLING.

Project: Language processing and the bilingual mind

The aim of this project is to investigate the ways in which the presence of linguistic input from two proximal varieties affects the ability of adult neurotypical speakers to provide stable acceptability judgments about the structures that form part of their native repertoires. Through eliciting and examining acceptability judgments that target different domains of grammar, this project will foster comparisons across monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and Catalan. Acceptability judgments are a reliable tool in linguistic research that can provide valuable insights into the patterns of variation that Universal Grammar permits. Equally well established is the idea that acceptability judgments should be understood as points on a spectrum. More importantly, their position on the spectrum is affected by a variety of extra-grammatical factors such as gradience, frequency, and competing grammars. Assuming that Universal Grammar does not dictate the relevant orderings, the input effects have to be investigated for the surfacing patterns to be explained. The presence of variation in the input may affect judgments in ways that remain to be defined. Could it be the case that the 'gray area' of partial acceptability judgments is bigger in bilingual populations compared to monolingual ones? Is the stability of judgments affected more or less in the bilingual populations?
This project will answer these questions through testing monolingual speakers of Spanish and bilingual speakers of Spanish and Catalan, in timed forced choice tasks, something that will enable tapping into both accuracy and speed. The same structures will be tested through various tasks and in different point in times in order to determine whether the judgments provided by the bilingual population are as stable as those of the monolingual population. This combination of an on-line and an off-line measure will provide better insights into the ways the various structures are processed in the bilingual mind.

Open Access publications

• Leivada, E., Dentella, V., Masullo, C., & Rothman, J. (2022). On trade-offs in bilingualism and moving beyond the Stacking the Deck fallacy. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1-6. View full-text
• Masullo, C., Dentella, V., & Leivada, E. (2023). 73% of the observed bilingual (dis)advantageous effects on cognition stem from sociolinguistic factors: A systematic review. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1-15. View full-text

Outreach activities

• European Researchers' Night 2023. European Corner: "A social-based theory of bilingual adaptations on cognition and their impact on language processing".