Minna Lehtonen
PhD, Professor
minna.h.lehtonen@utu.fi |
Psycholinguistics; Cognitive Neuroscience; Psychology of Language; Multilingualism; Bilingualism; Executive Functions; Morphological Processing
I started as a Professor at University of Turku in August 2020. Before this, I worked as a professor and associate professor at University of Oslo. I hold a Title of Docent at University of Helsinki.
My research focuses on the neurocognitive basis of processing and learning of language, with an emphasis on bilingualism/multilingualism. I am interested in possible neurocognitive and linguistic consequences of bilingualism as well as the relationship between executive functions and language. We are utilizing a range of brain imaging and behavioural experimental techniques, as well as surveys and meta-analytic methods. We are also developing and using digital tools such as mobile applications and games to study the learning of Finnish and other Nordic languages (see, e.g., the NordForsk-funded TEFLON project: https://teflon.aalto.fi/). In these projects, our study participants include, for example, bilingual and multilingual adults and children, learners of Finnish, and persons with aphasia.
I teach
psycholinguistics and bilingualism and am currently in charge of bachelor’s and master’s
thesis seminars. I also supervise BA,
MA, and PhD students.
- Challenges in inflected word processing for L2 speakers - The role of stem allomorphy (2025)
- Studies in Second Language Acquisition
- Collecting Linguistic Resources for Assessing Children’s Pronunciation of Nordic Languages (2024)
- LREC Proceedings
- LASTU: A psycholinguistic search tool for Finnish lexical stimuli (2024)
- Behavior Research Methods
- Prediction ability in bilingual individuals: an eye tracking study with younger and older adults (2024)
- Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science
- Ready, steady, switch! Limited evidence for the role of executive functions in bilingual language control in children (2024)
- Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
- Subword Representations Successfully Decode Brain Responses to Morphologically Complex Written Words (2024)
- Neurobiology of language
- Training finnish morphology with a smartphone application in adult beginner level learners (2024)
- Computer Assisted Language Learning
- Cross-language generalization of language treatment in multilingual people with post-stroke aphasia: A meta-analysis (2023)
- Brain and Language
- The relationship between bilingual language use and executive functions (2023)
- Nature Reviews Psychology
- Does bilingualism come with linguistic costs? A meta-analytic review of the bilingual lexical deficit (2022)
- Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
- Event-related potential correlates of learning to produce novel foreign phonemes (2022)
- Neurobiology of language
- Pathological Language-Switching/Mixing and Its Relationship to Domain-General Cognitive Control (2022) Multilingualism across the Lifespan Fyndanis Valanti, Lehtonen Minna
- Does language switching behavior rely on general executive functions? (2021)
- Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
- Lexize: A test to quickly assess vocabulary knowledge in Finnish (2021)
- Scandinavian Journal of Psychology
- Mobiilisovellukset toisen ja vieraan kielen oppimisen tukena (2021)
- Puheen ja kielen tutkimuksen yhdistyksen julkaisuja
- Assessing bilingual language switching behavior with Ecological Momentary Assessment (2020)
- Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
- Production of Inflected Novel Words in Older Adults With and Without Dementia (2020)
- Cognitive Science
- Effects of morphological family on word recognition in normal aging, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer's disease (2019)
- Cortex
- Statistical models of morphology predict eye-tracking measures during visual word recognition (2019)
- Memory and Cognition
- The Relationship of Anxiety and Stress With Working Memory Performance in a Large Non-depressed Sample (2019)
- Frontiers in Psychology