Matthew Carlson

I am an Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics in the department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. I completed my Ph.D. in Spanish Linguistics here at Penn State in 2007, with the option in Applied Linguistics. I then worked as a postdoc at the University of Chicago under the mentorship of Susan Goldin-Meadow and Susan Levine, followed by an appointment as Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso before returning to Penn State. I am interested in bilingualism and second language acquisition across the lifespan. My primary research focus is on phonology and morphology in the bilingual mental lexicon. Using a variety of behavioral methods, phonetic analysis, and eye-tracking, I am currently investigating how bilinguals dynamically rely on their two language systems, and how those systems interact under varying conditions. I apply similar methods as well as computational modeling of the lexicon as a complex network to explore how structured knowledge of the lexicon impacts the learning and processing of words by children and adults.