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Viorica Marian
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Viorica Marian
Viorica Marian is a Moldovan-born American psycholinguist, cognitive scientist, and psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism. She is the Ralph and Jean Sundin Endowed Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and professor of psychology at Northwestern University. Marian is the principal investigator of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group. She received her PhD in psychology from Cornell University, and master's degrees from Emory University and from Cornell University. Marian studies language, cognition, the brain, and the consequences of knowing more than one language for linguistic, cognitive, and neural architectures.
Viorica Marian was born in Chișinău, Moldova, in a family of public health physicians. Her mother was an epidemiologist and her father taught at the medical university; her brother is a lawyer in Stockholm, Sweden. Marian grew up speaking Romanian and Russian and studied English in school. She first came to the United States as part of a high school delegation, returning a year later to attend college. She received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Alaska Anchorage, a master's degree in cognitive and developmental psychology from Emory University, and a PhD and second master's degree in human experimental psychology from Cornell University. Viorica Marian was the last graduate student and mentee of American psychologist Ulric Neisser, widely regarded as the “Father of Cognitive Psychology.” Since 2000, Marian has been a professor at Northwestern University, where she currently holds the Ralph and Jean Sundin Endowed Chair in Communication Sciences and Disorders. Marian served as department chair of Northwestern University's department of communication sciences and disorders between 2011-2014 and as chair of the National Institutes of Health Study Section on Language and Communication between 2020 and 2022.
Marian is a recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science John P. McGovern Award, the Psychonomic Society Mid-Career Award, the Clarence Simon Award for Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring, the University of Alaska Alumni of Achievement Award, and the Editor's Award for best paper from the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, and is a fellow of the Psychonomic Society.
Marian was trained in eye-tracking by Michael Spivey, and in functional neuroimaging by Joy Hirsch, and was also influenced by Stephen Ceci, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Frank Keil, Joan Sereno, Daryl Bem, David Field, Carol Krumhansl, Thomas Gilovich, Shimon Edelman, and James Cutting while at Cornell. At Emory, she was influenced by psychologists Philippe Rochat, Robyn Fivush, Eugene Winograd, Carolyn Mervis, John Pani, Michael Tomasello, Frans de Waal, and others. At the University of Alaska, Marian studied with Alaska's only cognitive psychologist at the time, Dr. Robert Madigan.
Viorica Marian's research areas include Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics, Cognitive Science, Language and Cognition, Linguistic and Cultural Diversity, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Bilingualism, and Multilingualism. She studies language processing, language and memory, language learning, language development, audio-visual integration, bilingual assessment, neurolinguistics of bilingualism, and computational models of bilingual language processing. Marian uses multiple approaches, including eye-tracking, EEG, fMRI, mouse-tracking, computational modeling, and cognitive tests to understand how bilingualism and multilingualism change human function. Funding for her research comes from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, private foundations, and Northwestern University.
Parallel activation of both languages in bilinguals.
Marian's research revealed that bilinguals activate both languages in parallel during spoken language comprehension. The traditional account of bilingual spoken language processing was the Language Switch Hypothesis, which posited that bilinguals turn off the non-target language during target language processing. Using eye-tracking, Marian demonstrated that bilinguals do not turn off the non-target language, and instead process the two languages in parallel and co-activate words from both languages as speech unfolds. For example, she showed that when Russian-English bilinguals were asked to pick up a marker, they also made eye movements to a stamp, because the Russian word for stamp (marka) shared phonological form with the target English word and became co-activated. This research showed, for the first time, that, as words unfold, phonological input gets mapped onto both of a bilingual's languages. Marian has since extended these findings to Spanish-English, German-English and even ASL-English bilinguals, the latter showing that co-activation of two languages can take place across modalities and relies not only on bottom-up, but also on top-down and lateral processes. This work yields strong support for a dynamic bilingual language system that accommodates a high degree of interactivity between and within languages. Co-activation of two languages has since been replicated in many laboratories around the world and as a result of this work, the view that bilinguals co-activate both languages in parallel during comprehension has become widely accepted among language scientists.
Language-dependent memory.
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Viorica Marian
Viorica Marian is a Moldovan-born American psycholinguist, cognitive scientist, and psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism. She is the Ralph and Jean Sundin Endowed Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, and professor of psychology at Northwestern University. Marian is the principal investigator of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group. She received her PhD in psychology from Cornell University, and master's degrees from Emory University and from Cornell University. Marian studies language, cognition, the brain, and the consequences of knowing more than one language for linguistic, cognitive, and neural architectures.
Viorica Marian was born in Chișinău, Moldova, in a family of public health physicians. Her mother was an epidemiologist and her father taught at the medical university; her brother is a lawyer in Stockholm, Sweden. Marian grew up speaking Romanian and Russian and studied English in school. She first came to the United States as part of a high school delegation, returning a year later to attend college. She received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Alaska Anchorage, a master's degree in cognitive and developmental psychology from Emory University, and a PhD and second master's degree in human experimental psychology from Cornell University. Viorica Marian was the last graduate student and mentee of American psychologist Ulric Neisser, widely regarded as the “Father of Cognitive Psychology.” Since 2000, Marian has been a professor at Northwestern University, where she currently holds the Ralph and Jean Sundin Endowed Chair in Communication Sciences and Disorders. Marian served as department chair of Northwestern University's department of communication sciences and disorders between 2011-2014 and as chair of the National Institutes of Health Study Section on Language and Communication between 2020 and 2022.
Marian is a recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science John P. McGovern Award, the Psychonomic Society Mid-Career Award, the Clarence Simon Award for Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring, the University of Alaska Alumni of Achievement Award, and the Editor's Award for best paper from the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, and is a fellow of the Psychonomic Society.
Marian was trained in eye-tracking by Michael Spivey, and in functional neuroimaging by Joy Hirsch, and was also influenced by Stephen Ceci, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Frank Keil, Joan Sereno, Daryl Bem, David Field, Carol Krumhansl, Thomas Gilovich, Shimon Edelman, and James Cutting while at Cornell. At Emory, she was influenced by psychologists Philippe Rochat, Robyn Fivush, Eugene Winograd, Carolyn Mervis, John Pani, Michael Tomasello, Frans de Waal, and others. At the University of Alaska, Marian studied with Alaska's only cognitive psychologist at the time, Dr. Robert Madigan.
Viorica Marian's research areas include Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics, Cognitive Science, Language and Cognition, Linguistic and Cultural Diversity, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Bilingualism, and Multilingualism. She studies language processing, language and memory, language learning, language development, audio-visual integration, bilingual assessment, neurolinguistics of bilingualism, and computational models of bilingual language processing. Marian uses multiple approaches, including eye-tracking, EEG, fMRI, mouse-tracking, computational modeling, and cognitive tests to understand how bilingualism and multilingualism change human function. Funding for her research comes from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, private foundations, and Northwestern University.
Parallel activation of both languages in bilinguals.
Marian's research revealed that bilinguals activate both languages in parallel during spoken language comprehension. The traditional account of bilingual spoken language processing was the Language Switch Hypothesis, which posited that bilinguals turn off the non-target language during target language processing. Using eye-tracking, Marian demonstrated that bilinguals do not turn off the non-target language, and instead process the two languages in parallel and co-activate words from both languages as speech unfolds. For example, she showed that when Russian-English bilinguals were asked to pick up a marker, they also made eye movements to a stamp, because the Russian word for stamp (marka) shared phonological form with the target English word and became co-activated. This research showed, for the first time, that, as words unfold, phonological input gets mapped onto both of a bilingual's languages. Marian has since extended these findings to Spanish-English, German-English and even ASL-English bilinguals, the latter showing that co-activation of two languages can take place across modalities and relies not only on bottom-up, but also on top-down and lateral processes. This work yields strong support for a dynamic bilingual language system that accommodates a high degree of interactivity between and within languages. Co-activation of two languages has since been replicated in many laboratories around the world and as a result of this work, the view that bilinguals co-activate both languages in parallel during comprehension has become widely accepted among language scientists.
Language-dependent memory.