Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta

Job: Senior Lecturer in Psychology

Faculty: Health and Life Sciences

School/department: School of Applied Social Sciences

Address: De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH

T: N/A

E: kaitlyn.zavaleta@dmu.ac.uk

 

Personal profile

Dr. Zavaleta is a cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist. Her research expertise lies at the intersection of psychology and linguistics with a focus on bilingualism and second language acquisition (SLA). Specifically, she is interested in how an adult speaker learns and uses two or more languages. 

When an individual uses a language, they rely on complicated cognitive processes to serve the ability to understand what someone is saying in the target language (the process of comprehension) and to be able to respond in the target language (the process of production). Dr. Zavaleta's research projects examine language learning aptitude and language use by measuring both of these processes in a variety of methods.

Research group affiliations

Institute for Psychological Science

Research interests/expertise

Bilingualism and multilingualism, Second Language Acquisition (SLA), language production, speech errors, cognitive control, language switching, and individual differences.

Areas of teaching

Research methods and cognitive psychology

Qualifications

PhD and MA in Cognition and Neural Systems in Psychology; BA in Linguistics

ORCID number

0000-0001-7485-3880

kaitlyn-zavaleta