About myself

For over a decade my research has circled one problem: how the human mind builds meaning from language — how readers and speakers retrieve words, link grammar to meaning, and turn text into understanding, and how these processes shift across languages, speakers, and stages of development. I pursue this with behavioural and EEG methods, and now lead GenLab, the behavioural and EEG laboratory I founded at Goethe University Frankfurt, where I hold a DFG Emmy Noether grant (GenPath, over €1.5 million) to trace the neural pathways of grammatical gender across languages. I am now also drawn to a question I did not expect to be asking a decade ago — none of us did: what happens to our mind when a machine offers to do the reading for it? I am developing an experimental program on what AI-assisted summarization does to deep reading — currently in adults, with the aim of extending it to adolescence, where the developmental stakes are highest — bringing the rigor of psycholinguistic and electrophysiological methods to questions about adults coping and children's learning and thriving in an AI-enabled world.

The range of these questions reflects the path I took to reach them: an interdisciplinary route at the border between Cognitive and Social Psychology and Experimental and Applied Linguistics, through: the Universities of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and Minho (Portugal), the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University (Netherlands), the Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Centre at the University of Granada (Spain), the English Department at the University of Göttingen (Germany), and the Departments of Romance Languages and — now — Psychology at Goethe University Frankfurt. I collected behavioural and electrophysiological data at each of these places, never staying within only one language for long.

Today, alongside GenPath, I contribute to international projects on multilingualism in educational contexts and children's cognitive development in collaboration with the University of Minho in Portugal; on the role of emotions during language comprehension in German bilinguals and Spanish mono-, bi-, and trilinguals; on the role of prosody in the expression of negation in speech; on the impact of cross-linguistic morphological overlap in Portuguese- versus Polish-speaking learners of German when reading this language; on how social stereotypes shape lexical processing across twelve languages and four continents; and, more recently, on how cognitive science can be communicated to the public. My research is not confined to a single language or a single question.

My collaborative network is grounded in my academic background. I graduated in Psychology (with honors) from the University of Santiago de Compostela, took a Master's in Advanced Studies on Language, Communication, and Related Pathologies, and defended my PhD (cum laude, Extraordinary Doctorate Award) in December 2021 on the representation and processing of grammatical gender. During that Master's I also completed a school-based practicum with children facing developmental and language-learning difficulties — my first direct experience of how the science of language meets the realities of children's learning, and, in hindsight, where the thread to part of my current work begins.

Along the way, competitive fellowships have supported all this research: from the Spanish Ministry of Education, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, the Spanish Society of Experimental Psychology (SEPEX), the DAAD, the Johanna Quandt Young Academy, and Goethe University; a postdoctoral position funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Andalusian Government; and the Dorothea Schlözer Postdoctoral Program at Göttingen. Most recently, I was awarded a DFG Emmy Noether grant — the German Research Foundation's scheme for outstanding early-career researchers to lead their own group — funding my project GenPath with over €1.5 million.

My theoretical model of gender processing in comprehension (SL2024; Sá-Leite & Lago, 2024) received the European Society of Cognitive Psychology's Early Career Publication Award, and in 2026 I received SEPEX's Emerging Research Talent Award.