Faculty
Assistant Professor
Nuria Sagarra
Nuria Sagarra (Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Penn State, where she also directs the Eyetracking and Language Processing Laboratory, the Spanish Basic Language Program, and the Spanish Technology Project.
She has been the recipient of a National Science Foundation grant, two Children Youth and Families Consortium grants, and a Computer-based Testing development grant. She is an editorial board member for Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada and has been a consultant to the U.S. Institute of International Education. She has published in such scholarly journals as Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Modern Language Journal, and Hispania, has written book chapters for Oxford University Press, Multilingual Matters, and John Benjamins, and is working on a book entitled Second Language Processing: From Psycholinguistic Theory and Research to Classroom Instruction.
Like this book, her research straddles the domains of cognitive science, linguistics, language acquisition, and education to propose instruction-relevant explanations of limited second language attainment in adult learners that are grounded in usage, transfer, and working memory. Her investigations draw on real-time measures (moving window paradigm, eyetracking) and show that, unlike Spanish monolinguals, Anglophone learners of Spanish rely more on lexical cues than morphological cues to process temporal reference and that they process object relative clauses as subject ones. She suggests that these results are due to transfer effects and confirms that more advanced adult learners are able to acquire uninterpretable functional features, such as gender and tense, that are absent in their native language. Her work also indicates that adult learners with a low working memory span process foreign languages less effectively than those with a high memory span. Sparked by these findings, she proposes an innovative approach to foreign language instruction that springs from the idea that learners are limited processors who would benefit from classroom practices that compensate for the cognitive constraints that processing a foreign language imposes on adults. Her studies suggest that input simplification via pause insertion and shorter sentences reduces the learner’s cognitive load and promotes comprehension and that input enhancement makes linguistic forms more salient hence raising grammar consciousness. She also encourages the use of overt feedback in a computer-assisted context to help learners interpret recasts as corrective feedback on grammatical errors in the classroom. Finally, she recommends vocabulary learning techniques that require deeper processing, such as the keyword method and semantic mapping, for lexical retention. Her research is directly related to her teaching and language program coordination.
She teaches graduate courses in psycholinguistics, working memory, second language acquisition, statistics, and teaching methodology. In her role as director of the largest basic Spanish program of a Big Ten school, she has successfully transitioned the program from traditional to computer-enhanced instruction by developing the electronic textbook Mosaicos and has found that utilizing online workbooks for two consecutive semesters lead to better learning than using paper workbooks. Finally, she has standardized the placement exam SCAPE and is currently implementing computer-based testing in the program.
