Please join us for our next Brown Bag speaker event of the semester on Wednesday, February 26, 3:30pm, at LRW 4001.

Dr. Renan Ferreira will present a paper titled “Thinking for reading: how bilinguals process motion in English as a foreign language.” Dr. Ferreira is a postdoctoral fellow at the Federal University of Pelotas, Brazil, and a visiting researcher at ARiEAL, where he collaborates with the MELD Research Lab and the Reading Lab. This marks his second visit to ARiEAL, following his participation last year as a member of the inaugural cohort of ARiEAL’s International Scholar Award Program.

Dr. Ferreira provided the following summary:

How do bilinguals process motion in a foreign language, and how does their native language shape this process? In this talk, I will share the latest developments from a self-paced reading study, initially piloted in collaboration with Dr. Daniel Schmidtke during my first visit to ARiEAL in 2024. This study builds on my PhD research, which showed that Brazilian users of FL-English describe motion in three ways: using the target-like English pattern, the L1-Portuguese pattern, or a hybrid of both. Now, we are testing how these bilinguals process sentences with these patterns and what factors influence reading times. I will present some findings from the pilot study, discuss methodological refinements in the full-scale research now underway in Brazil, and explore broader implications for motion cognition and second language learning. Hope to see you there!