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.
- Independence of visual awareness from the scope of attention: An electrophysiological study (2006)
- Cerebral Cortex
- Neural correlates of morphological decomposition in a morphologically rich language: An fMRI study (2006)
- Brain and Language
- Recognition of inflected words in a morphologically limited language: Frequency effects in monolinguals and bilinguals (2006)
- Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
- Brain correlates of sentence translation in Finnish-Norwegian bilinguals (2005)
- NeuroReport
- How word frequency affects morphological processing in mono- and bilinguals. (2003) Lehtonen M, Laine M