Undergraduate Research from the Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain Lab Showcased at UROP Symposium

By Rachel Sampson
May 21, 2025

On May 16, undergraduate students affiliated with the Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain (BMB) Lab at the UC Irvine School of Education presented their research at the 2025 UROP Symposium. These students, representing diverse academic backgrounds beyond Education Science, shared interdisciplinary projects exploring how bilingualism intersects with cognition, emotion, and learning.

Presentations included:
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• The Heritage Bilingualism Experience and its Impact on Language Processing
  Leslie Arce-Pozos (Team Leader: Guadalupe Mendoza)

 

• Linguistic Landscapes and Grammatical Gender in Spanish
  Francisca Rosibe Castaneda Gonzalez, Yuxin Liu, Reina Elizabeth Samuels, Yunzhi Zhang, Xinlei Zhu, Maria Isabel Torres (Team Leader: Alexandra Roman Irizarry)
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• ​​​How Linguistic Distance Shapes Emotional Interference in Bilingual Individuals
  Hanah Kitamoto (Team Leader: Nicole Vargas Fuentes)
  

A group of undergraduate student researchers at the UROP Symposium

• Interactional Experience and Cognitive Control: The Role of Language Brokering​
  Michelle Chan (Team Leader: Nicole Vargas Fuentes)
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• How Bilingual Language Experience Shapes Learning of American Sign Language
  Alexa Betwarda, Victoria McCarthy, Eden Liu (Team Leader: Remie Lou Geha)
  
  
• Buffering the Bilingual Mind: How Confidence Shapes Translation and Cue-Driven Language Processing
  Annie Le and Jackeline Hernandez (Team Leader: Jasmin Hernandez)
  
  
• The Effect of Interactional Contexts on Bilingual Language Processing
  Catherine Maximous and Dan Nguyen (Team Leader: Judith Kroll)
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These projects reflect the innovative and collaborative spirit of the BMB Lab, where undergraduates contribute meaningfully to research on bilingualism’s cognitive and social dimensions.​