Ana Rita Sá Leite   Google Scholar ResearchGate Web of Science ORCID

Junior Research Group Leader — Psycholinguistics

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Germany

If you are here, you are probably wondering who I am. You may call me Ana Rita (Ana according to my mom, Rita according to my dad)! I am a cognitive scientist and psycholinguist who studies how the human mind builds meaning from language (how we read, understand, and remember), work grounded in over a decade studying language acquisition and processing, grammatical structure, and the bilingual mind. Lately, I have been interested in exploring how grammatical gender is expressed in orthography and phonology, the role of emotion in language, the link between our mental representation of grammar and our social cognition, and the role of a not-so-silent giant — generative AI — in the way we read and understand.

I am currently the leader of GenLab, a top-notch electroencephalographic lab at the Department of Psychology of the Goethe University Frankfurt. Check the GenLab website!


Keywords: psycholinguistics, language comprehension, lexical access, grammatical gender, gender transparency, bilingualism, multilingualism, emotion in language, social stereotypes, EEG, electrophysiology

Recent News

I am delighted to share that Prof. Niels Schiller and I have published a chapter on the psycholinguistics of grammatical gender. Great summary for those of you who need an overview on the topic. Check it out! | June 2026

I cannot express how happy and honored I am to have received the 2026 Award for Emerging Research Talent from the Spanish Society of Experimental Psychology (SEPEX). Thank you so much for this recognition! Here is the link to the official announcement! | May 2026

A paper has been published in Brain and Language! We obtain evidence for a very early processing of gender in the absence of agreement, as well as differences between the masculine and the feminine. Check it out! | March 2026

Thanks to the DFG funding, I have opened my electroencephalographic lab at the Department of Psychology of the Goethe Uni. I am happy to announce that I am now leading a group of young and motivated scientists! Check the official website of GenLab! | October 2025

My project, GenPath, has been funded with 1.549.000 million euro by the German Research Foundation (DFG) Check the summary of the project! | August 2025

The Galician version of Multipic has been published in Frontiers in Psychology! I'm happy to have collaborated with such a great team of researchers to make this happen! Check it out! | March 2025

I won the Early Career Publication Award for Postdoctoral Researchers from the European Society of Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP) for my Sá-Leite & Lago (2024) paper | December 2024

I am happy to announce that my colleague Montserrat Comesaña and I have published the first article addressing the state of Psycholinguistics in regards of Galician, a minority language! Check it out! | December 2024

A paper has been published in Acta Psychologica presenting a mathematical method to measure the gender transparency of languages! Check it out! | April 2024

A paper has been published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review presenting an adaptation of a cognitive model of language processing (AUSTRAL model) to gender retrieval! Check it out! | February 2024

I have just presented a summary of my work on the interplay between languages during language production when it comes to gender encoding at the 23rd ESCOP conference! Check the slides on my ResearchGate! | September 2023

I have just presented our work on gender processing with German and Portuguese bilinguals at the 14th Heritage Language Research Institute! Check the slides on my ResearchGate! | June 2023

A paper has been published in Bilingualism Language and Cognition! Check it out! | May 2023

A paper has been published in the special issue "Spanish Psycholinguistics" of Frontiers in Psychology! Check it out! | May 2023

My current goals

  • Gender processing

    Tracing the neural signatures of grammatical gender during comprehension with EEG and behavioural methods across language families, and mapping how a word's form — its orthography and phonology — cues gender through dual-route and pseudomorphological mechanisms.

  • Social bias

    Testing whether sex-based social stereotypes are tied to the abstract and semantic gender of nouns during real-time processing, linking our mental representation of grammar to social cognition.

  • Emotion in language

    Exploring how emotion shapes comprehension across speakers, from German bilinguals to Spanish mono-, bi-, and trilinguals, and how affective meaning interacts with grammatical processing.

  • Reading in an AI world

    Asking what AI-assisted summarization does to deep reading, bringing psycholinguistic and EEG methods to how generative AI reshapes comprehension — first in adults, then across development.

List of publications


Schiller, N. O., & Sá-Leite, A. R. (2026). The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender. The psycholinguistics of grammatical gender. In N. O. Schiller & T. Kupisch (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of gender and classifiers (pp. 271–292). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/9780191957215.003.0015

Sá-Leite, A. R., Padrón, I., Fraga, I., Pinal, D., Pinto, C., & Comesaña, M. (2026). ERP markers of gender retrieval during noun production: Evidence for early processing and masculine-feminine asymmetries. Brain and Language, 274, 105700. doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2025.105700

Álvarez-de-la-Granja, M. Parafita-Couto, M. C., Sá-Leite, A. R., Fraga, I., Duñabeitia, J. A., Pliatsikas, C., & Comesaña, M. (2025). The Galician MultiPic: a picture dataset that captures lexical variation. Frontiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1551000

Comesaña, M. & Sá-Leite, A. R. (2024). Psycholinguistics in Galician: A review of the current state of the art. Cumieira das Letras. doi:10.35869/cumieiradasletras.v03.2024.11

Sá-Leite, A. R., Simpson, I., Fraga, I., & Comesaña, M. (2024). A standardized approach to measuring gender transparency in languages. Acta Psychologica. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104236

Sá-Leite, A. R., & Lago, S. (2024). The role of word form in gender processing during lexical access: A theoretical review and novel proposal in language comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. doi:10.3758/s13423-023-02426-8

Sá-Leite, A. R., Flores, C., Eira, C., Haro, J. & Comesaña, M. (2023). The balance between languages rather than the age of acquisition: A study on the cross-linguistic gender congruency effect. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. doi:10.1017/S1366728923000378

Casado, A., Sá-Leite, A. R., Pesciarelli, F. & Paolieri, D. (2023). Exploring the nature of the gender-congruency effect: implicit gender activation and social bias [Spanish Psycholinguistics]. Frontiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1160836

Sá-Leite, A. R., Comesaña, M., Acuña-Fariña, C., & Fraga, I. (2023). A cautionary note on the studies using the picture-word interference paradigm: The unwelcome consequences of the random use of “in/animates” [Animacy in Cognition: Effects, Mechanisms, and Theories]. Frontiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1145884

Sá-Leite, A. R., Tomaz, Â., Hernández-Cabrera, J., Fraga, I., & Comesaña, M. (2022). What a transparent Romance language with a Germanic gender-determiner mapping tells us about gender retrieval: Insights from European Portuguese. Psicológica, 43(2): e14777. doi:10.20350/digitalCSIC/14777

Sá-Leite, A. R., Haro, J., Comesaña, M., & Fraga, I. (2022). Of bats and tables: How animacy impacts the brain in a variety of tasks. Ciencia Cognitiva. Published online. (science outreach)

Sá-Leite, A. R., Luna, K., Tomaz, Â., Fraga, I., & Comesaña, M. (2022). The mechanisms underlying grammatical gender selection in language production: A meta-analysis of the gender congruency effect. Cognition, 224. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105060

Sá-Leite, A. R., Haro, J., Comesaña, M., & Fraga, I. (2021). Of beavers and tables: The role of animacy in the processing of grammatical gender within a picture-word interference task. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661175

Sá-Leite, A. R., Luna, K., Fraga, I., & Comesaña, M. (2020). The gender congruency effect across languages in bilinguals: A meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 27, 677-693. doi: 10.3758/s13423-019-01702-w

Sá-Leite, A. R., Fraga, I., & Comesaña, M. (2019). Grammatical gender processing in bilinguals: An analytic review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26, 1148-1173. doi: 10.3758/s13423-019-01596-8

Sá-Leite, A. R., & Fraga, I. (2017). Aprendizaje, representación y procesamiento de palabras ambiguas en bilingües. Escritos de Psicología, 10, 69-87. doi:10.5231/psy.writ.2017.13112

My CV


Click here to download a PDF version of my CV.