Mikel Santesteban Insausti

 
                                                                                                       
                                                                                                      Universitat de Barcelona
                                                                                                      Edifici Docent. Hospital de Sant Joan de Déu
                                                                                                      C/ Santa Rosa, 39-57, planta 4ª
                                                                                                      08950 Esplugues - Barcelona
                                                                                                                                        msantesteban@ub.edu
                                                                                                      telf: + 34 34 93 280 40 00 (ext.4429)
                                                                                  fax: +34 93 402 13 63

Interests

I’m interested in the study of the mechanisms involved in the process of language production, both in monolingual and bilingual participants. More specifically, I’m interested in the study of the nature of lexical and syntactic levels of language representation. To address these issues, I’m exploring the lexical selection mechanisms of bilinguals. I’m using the language-switching psycholinguistic experimental technique for this purpose.  
 


Education

  • 2000 - 2004. F.P.I. fellowship from the Basque Government (Eusko Jaurlaritza).
  • 2003. Diploma en Altos Estudios (Suficiencia Investigadora), in Cognitive Science & Language Ph.D program. Universitat de Barcelona.
  • 2003. Diploma en Altos Estudios (Suficiencia Investigadora), in Linguistics Ph.D program. Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea - University of the Basque Country.                                                                                                                   
  • 1995 - 1999. B.A. in Basque Philology. Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea – University of the Basque Country.


 

Visits to other labs
 

  • December 2001- February 2002: Visit to the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of the International School for Advanced Studies, SISSA (Trieste, Italy), with Professor Jacques Mehler.
  • July 2004 - October 2004: Visit to the Cognition and Language Laboratory of the Pennsylvania State University (State College, USA), with Professor Judith Kroll.


Publications

  • Costa, A. & Santesteban, M. (2004). Lexical access in bilingual speech production: Evidence from language switching in highly proficient bilinguals and L2 learners. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 491-511.
     
  • Costa, A. & Santesteban, M. (2004). Bilingual word perception and production: two sides of the same coin? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 253.
  • Costa, A. & Santesteban, M. (in press). On the facilitatory effects of cognate words in bilingual speech production. Brain and Language.


 

Presentations in Conferences

  • Santesteban, M. & Costa, A. (2005). Does cognate status play a role in bilingual lexical selection and representation?Evidence from a language-switching task. Paper presented at the 5th International Symposium on Bilingualism (ISB5). Barcelona, Spain.
  • Santesteban, M. & Costa, A. (2004). How special are cognate words? Evidence from a language-switching task.  Paper presented at the Second Language Research Forum (SLRF). State College, USA.
  • Santesteban, M. & Costa, A. (2004). How special are cognate words? Evidence from a language-switching task.  Poster presented at the International Workshop on Language Production. Marseille, France.
  • Costa, A. & Santesteban, M. (2003). Control atencional durante la producción del habla en sujetos bilingües en tareas de cambio de lengua [Attentional control during bilingual’s speech production in language switching tasks]. Paper presented at the V Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Psicología Experimental (SEPEX). Madrid, Spain.
  • Costa, A. & Santesteban, M. (2003). Do language-switching costs reveal different degrees of language activation?. Paper presented at the XIIIth congress of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP). Granada, Spain.
  • Santesteban, M. & Costa, A. (2003). Can highly-proficient bilinguals acquire two independent syntactic systems? Influence of L1 Head-Parameter on Determiner Phrase production in L2. Poster presented at The 9th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP-2003). Glasgow, Scotland.
  • Santesteban, M. & Costa, A. (2002). El bilingüísmo en la producción del lenguaje. Poster presented at the IV Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Psicología Experimental (SEPEX). Oviedo, Spain.
  • Santesteban M. (2001). Semantic Interference Effects in Verb Production. Poster presented at The XII Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP). Edinburgh, Scotland.
  • Santesteban, M. (2001). Efectos de interferencia semántica en la producción de verbos. Poster presented at the V Simposio de Psicolingüística. Granada, Spain.

Abstracts

  • Costa, A. & Santesteban, M. (2004). Lexical access in bilingual speech production: Evidence from language switching in highly proficient bilinguals and L2 learners. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 491-511.  

Five experiments are reported in which the picture naming performance of bilingual speakers in a language-switching task was explored. In Experiment 1, Spanish learners of Catalan and Korean learners of Spanish were asked  to perform a switching task between their first and dominant language (L1, Spanish or Korean) and their second language (L2, Catalan or Spanish). For these two groups switching from the weaker language (L2) to the more dominant language (L1) was harder than vice versa. This asymmetrical switching cost was not present when highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals performed the task either in their two dominant languages (Experiments 2 and 3) or in their dominant language (L1) and in their much weaker language (L3 English; Experiment 4). Furthermore, highly proficient bilinguals showed faster naming latencies in their weaker languages (L2 and L3) than in their dominant language (L1). Experiment tested whether a bias in the triggering of lexicalization is at the basis of such a difference. Together these results reveal that the switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals does not seem to be subject to the same mechanisms as that of L2 learners.


 

  • Costa, A., Santesteban, M. & Caño, À. (in press). On the facilitatory effects of cognate words in bilingual speech production. Brain and Language.

    There is a growing body of evidence showing that a word’s cognate status is an important dimension affecting the naming performance of bilingual speakers. In a recent article, Kohnert (2004) extended this observation to the naming performance of an aphasic bilingual (DJ). DJ named pictures with cognate names more accurately than pictures with non-cognate names. Furthermore, having named the pictures in Spanish helped the subsequent retrieval (with a delay of one week between the two tests) of the same pictures’ names in English, but only for pictures with cognate names. That is, there was a language transfer but only for those translation words that were phonologically similar. In this article we first evaluate the conclusions drawn from these results by Kohnert, and second we discuss the theoretical implications of the facilitatory effects of cognate words for models of speech production in bilingual speakers.

     

NOTE: please, feel free to ask me for any reprint or poster writing to msantesteban@ub.edu