Research Interests

I am a cognitive psychologist interested in language and memory. My particular interest is in the psycholinguistics of bilingualism and my research examines both early stages of second language acquisition and fluent bilingual performance. In the acquisition work, my students and I have been asking why it appears to be easier for some people to acquire a second language than others and what contexts of acquisition facilitate conceptual understanding of words in the second language. In the work on language processing in fluent bilinguals we have been especially interested in how bilinguals juggle the mental competition between the words available in each of their two languages to produce words in the language in which they intend to speak. In many respects this is an amazing cognitive feat. My students and I pursue this research in our laboratory at Penn State and also in collaboration with colleagues in The Netherlands. Dutch university students are a particularly interesting group of bilinguals because speakers appear to switch with little difficulty from Dutch to English or French or German. We believe that understanding the manner in which bilinguals accomplish language production and language switching will tell us something important not only about bilingualism but also about the way in which competition is resolved within cognitive systems.

Recent Publications

Kroll, J. F., & De Groot, A. M. B., Eds. (to appear in 2004). Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Approaches. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kroll, J. F., & Tokowicz, N. (in press). Models of bilingual representation and processing. To appear in J. F. Kroll & A. M. B. De Groot (Eds.), Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Approaches. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kroll, J. F., Sumutka, B. M., & Schwartz, A. I. (in press). A cognitive view of the bilingual lexicon: Reading and speaking words in two languages. International Journal of Bilingualism.

Kroll, J. F., & Dussias, P. (in press). The comprehension of words and sentences in two languages. In T. Bhatia & W. Ritchie (Eds.), Handbook of Bilingualism. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Sebastián-Gallés, N., & Kroll, J. F. (in press). Phonology in bilingual language processing: Acquisition, perception, and production. In N. Schiller & A. Meyer (Eds.), Phonetics and Phonology in Language Comprehension and Production: Differences and Similarities. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kroll, J. F., & Sunderman, G. (2003). Cognitive processes in second language acquisition: The Development of Lexical and Conceptual Representations. In C. Doughty & M. Long (Eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 104-129). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Tokowicz, N., Kroll, J. F., De Groot, A.M.B., & Van Hell, J.G. (2002). Number of translation norms for Dutch-English translation pairs: A new tool for examining language production. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers, 34, 435-451.

Miller, N. A., & Kroll, J. F. (2002). Stroop effects in bilingual translation. Memory & Cognition, 30, 614-628.

Kroll, J. F., Michael, E., Tokowicz, N., & Dufour, R. (2002). The development of lexical fluency in a second language. Second Language Research, 18, 137-171.

De Bot, K., & Kroll, J. F. (2002). Psycholinguistics. In N. Schmitt (Ed.), Introduction to Applied Linguistics (pp. 133-149). Arnold Publishers.

Kroll, J. F., & Dijkstra, A. (2002). The bilingual lexicon. In R. Kaplan (Ed.), Handbook of Applied Linguistics (pp. 301-321). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kroll, J. F. (2001). Book Review: N. Poulisse (1999). Slips of the tongue: Speech errors in rirst and second language production. The Clarion, 7, 5-8. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Jared, D. & Kroll, J. F. (2001). Do bilinguals activate phonological representations in one or both of their languages when naming words? Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 2-31.

Gollan, T., & Kroll, J. F. (2001). Bilingual lexical access. In B. Rapp (Ed.), The Handbook of Cognitive Neuropsychology: What Deficits Reveal About the Human Mind (pp. 321-345). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.

Kroll, J. F., & Tokowicz, N. (2001). The development of conceptual representation for words in a second language. In J. L. Nicol (Ed.), One Mind, Two Languages: Bilingual Language Processing (pp. 49-71). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Talamas, A., Kroll, J. F., & Dufour, R. (1999). Form related errors in second language learning: A preliminary stage in the acquisition of L2 vocabulary. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2, 45-58.