Jorge González Alonso

About

I received a BA in English Philology from the University of Oviedo, followed by an MA in Language Acquisition at the University of Sheffield (UK). I obtained my PhD from the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of Professor María del Pilar García Mayo, with a thesis entitled Morphological Processing and Representation in Multilingualism. My research career started during my masters and PhD years, in which I extended my undergraduate linguistic training to the field of child and adult language acquisition. From my master’s thesis, I began to employ psycholinguistic methodologies to gauge information about implicit language processing in multilingual individuals. This methodological toolkit was expanded in my PhD dissertation and first postdoctoral contract at the University of the Basque Country, where I developed work based on priming methodologies in collaboration with colleagues in Colombia (Universidad Nacional) and the USA (University of Florida). My second postdoctoral contract, at the University of Reading (UK), introduced me to two methodologies which are prominent in my current work: eye-tracking (through joint work with Dr. Ian Cunnings) and Event-Related Potentials (ERPs), an EEG-based technique. I acquired expertise in this last method, which has become my primary in recent years at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, through an extended collaboration with Professor Jason Rothman (now at UiT, then at Reading) and Dr. José Alemán Bañón (now at Stockholm University), which developed organically to include colleagues from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Birmingham, King’s College London, the University of Konstanz, or the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. This habit of international networking is an integral part of my research philosophy: across the 26 publications in my record, I have worked with 21 co-authors from 16 different institutions. In my previous position at UiT, I continued to develop my main research lines in joint work with other researchers at the AcqVA Aurora Center. Since my research questions cut across several disciplines (language processing, linguistic theory, language acquisition, neurolinguistics), I approach them with an equally interdisciplinary mindset. For that reason, I conduct experiments with (offline and speeded) grammaticality judgements, self-paced reading, masked priming, eye-tracking and ERPs, employing both natural and artificial languages. I have recently joined the Nebrija Research Center in Cognition (CINC) as a Principal Investigator (Senior researcher), leading a research line on the role of attention and memory in language learning. Finally, I believe that knowledge dissemination is a pillar of scientific progress, and I have taken every opportunity to communicate the results of my research and pass on my skills to younger researchers and older colleagues alike, through teaching at graduate level, technical seminars, public outreach events and mentoring, including the co-supervision of two PhD students, both of whom obtained their PhDs in 2021 with top marks.

Education

Publications