José Alemán Bañón

About me

My research interests include Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism, Psycho- and Neurolinguistics, and Morphosyntax. I am also interested in Methods, especially EEG (and ERP), which I have used extensively in my research.

My research program, which lies at the intersection between linguistic theory and cognitive neuroscience, examines the factors that impact the online processing of morphosyntactic dependencies in both native speakers and adult second language (L2) learners. Much of my work has centered around the processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish in both native speakers and English-speaking learners. This work examines the role of linguistic factors, such as structural distance or markedness, on agreement processing. In addition, it investigates the extent to which L2 processing is constrained by the properties of the learners' L1 and by individual differences in linguistic and cognitive factors.

Lately I have been interested in the role of predictive processing among adult L2 learners, and I have recently started a research program that examines prediction at multiple levels of linguistic representation. In October 2018, I received a grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (3,412,000SEK) to pursue this research program.

Below you can find a list with representative publications. I have also added a link to my Research Gate account, where you can find pdfs of some of these papers.

Borg, R., & Alemán Bañón, J., (under review). Examining the facilitative use of grammatical gender cues in L1 and L2 Swedish.

Schiller, N., & Alemán Bañón, J., (under review). Neurolinguistics of grammatical gender.

Alemán Bañón, J., & Martin, C. (Accepted for publication). Lexicosemantic prediction in native speakers of English and Swedish-speaking learners of English: An event-related potentials study. Submitted to Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Alemán Bañón, J., Fiorentino, R., & Gabriele, A. (2023). The neurolinguistics of the L2 syntactic system. In K. Morgan-Short & J. G. van Hell (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Neurolinguistics, 133‑117. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003190912-13

Alemán Bañón, J., & Martin, C. (2021). The role of crosslinguistic differences in second language anticipatory processing: An event-related potentials study. Neuropsychologia, 155, 107797. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2021.107797

Gabriele, A., Alemán Bañón, J., Hoffman, L., Covey, L., Rossomondo, A., & Fiorentino, R. (2021). Linguistic and cognitive abilities facilitate the processing of agreement in novice learners: Evidence from event‑related potentials. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 47(7), 1106‑1140. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000983

Alemán Bañón, J., Miller, D., & Rothman, J. (2020). Examining the contribution of markedness to the L2 processing of Spanish person agreement: An event‑related potentials study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 43, 699‑728. doi:10.1017/S0272263120000479

Molnar, M., Alemán Bañón, J., Mancini, S., Caffarra, S. (2020). The processing of Spanish article‑noun gender agreement by monolingual and bilingual toddlers. Language and Speech, 64(4), 980‑990. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0023830920977050

González Alonso, J., Alemán Bañón, J., DeLuca, V., Miller, D., Pereira Soares, S. M., Puig-Mayenco, E., Slaats, S., & Rothman, J. (2020). Event‑related potentials at initial exposure in third language acquisition: Implications from an artificial mini-grammar study. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 56, 100939. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2020.100939

Alemán Bañón, J., & Martin, C. (2019). Anticipating information structure: An event‑related potentials study on Focus assignment via the it‑cleft. Neuropsychologia, 134, 107203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.107203

Alemán Bañón, J., & Rothman, J. (2019) Being a participant matters: Event‑related potentials show that markedness modulates person agreement in Spanish. Frontiers in Psychology, 10:746. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00746

Alemán Bañón, J., Fiorentino, R., & Gabriele, A. (2018). Using event‑related potentials to track morphosyntactic development in second language learners: The processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish. PLoS ONE, 13(7): e0200791. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200791

Alemán Bañón, J., Miller, D., & Rothman, J. (2017). Morphological variability in second language learners: An examination of electrophysiological and production data. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43, 1509‑1536. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/xlm0000394

Alemán Bañón, J. & Rothman, J. (2016). The role of morphological markedness in the processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish: An event-related potential investigation. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31, 1273‑1298. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2016.1218032

Rothman, J., Alemán Bañón, J., & González, J. (2015). Neuro/psycholinguistic measures of typological effects in multilingual transfer: Introducing an ERP methodology. Frontiers in Psychology, 6:1087. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01087

Alemán Bañón, J., Fiorentino, R., & Gabriele, A. (2014). Morphosyntactic processing in advanced second language (L2) learners: An event‑related potential investigation of the effects of L1‑L2 similarity and structural distance. Second Language Research, 30, 275‑306. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658313515671

Gabriele, A., Fiorentino, R., & Alemán Bañón, J. (2013). Examining second language development using event‑related potentials: A cross-sectional study on the processing of gender and number agreement. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 3, 213‑232. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.3.2.04gab

Alemán Bañón, J., Fiorentino, R., & Gabriele, A. (2012). The processing of number and gender agreement in Spanish: An event‑related potential investigation of the effects of structural distance. Brain Research, 1456, 49‑63; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2012.03.057