Professional Bio

Research Overview

Judith F. Kroll is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine and  former director of the Center for Language Science at Pennsylvania State University. She held faculty positions at Swarthmore College, Rutgers University, Mount Holyoke College, Penn State University, and University of California, Riverside before joining the faculty at UC Irvine in 2019. Her research uses the tools of cognitive neuroscience to examine the way that bilinguals juggle the presence of two languages in one mind and brain. Her work, which has been supported by grants from NSF and NIH, shows that bilingualism provides a tool for revealing the interplay between language and cognition that is otherwise obscure in speakers of one language alone. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Psychonomic Society, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists. She was one of the founding editors of the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge University Press), and one of the founding organizers of Women in Cognitive Science, a group developed to promote the advancement of women in the cognitive sciences and supported by NSF (http://womenincogsci.org/). With Penn State colleagues, she was the PI on a 2010 NSF PIRE (Partnerships for International Research and Education) grant to develop an international research network and program of training to enable language scientists at all levels to pursue research abroad on the science of bilingualism and on a 2015 NSF PIRE grant to translate the science of bilingualism to learning environments in the US and abroad.

Recent Research and Professional Experience

Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine, 2019-presentDistinguished Professor of

Psychology, University of California, Riverside, 2016-2019

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Linguistics, and Women’s Studies, Penn State, 2007-2016

Center for Language Science, Penn State U., Co-Director, 2006-2009; Director, 2009-2016

Visiting Sabbatical Scholar, Departments of Psychology and Linguistics, UCLA, 2013-2014

Visiting Professor, The Empirical Foundations of Linguistics International Chair of Quantitative and Experimental Linguistics, June 2012, Paris, France (http://www.labex-efl.org/)

Member, College of Reviewers, NSF Perception, Action, and Cognition Program, 2013-2018; Developmental Science, 2017-2020

Chair, Study Section, Language and Communication Study Section, NIH, 2005-2007; Member, 2003-2005

Visiting Professor, U. of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 1999-2000; Leiden U., Leiden, The Netherlands, 2000

Chair Elect, Chair, Past Chair, Section Z (Linguistics & Language Science),  American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2019-2022

Fellow, Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, UCI, 2023-present

Co-director, Bilingualism Matters in California, UCI, 2023-present

Honors and Awards

Howard Palmer Faculty Mentoring Award, Pennsylvania State University, 1999

LaMarr Kopp International Achievement Award, Pennsylvania State University, 2009

Faculty Scholar Medal in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Pennsylvania State, 2013

Face of Penn State, 2013

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, 2013-2014

Elected Keynote Speaker,  60^th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Montreal, CA, 2019

Psychonomic Society Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Leadership Award, 2021

External Funding

National Science Foundation Grant, OISE-1545900: PIRE (Partnerships in International Research and Education): Translating cognitive and brain science in the laboratory and field to language learning environments (PI, Paola Dussias, Co-PIs, Judith Kroll, John Lipski, Janet van Hell), 2016-2025 ($5,000,000 to Penn State University)/Subaward to UC Riverside (through 2019), PI, Judith Kroll ($967,739)/ Subaward transferred to UC Irvine (from 2019), PI, Judith Kroll ($626,625)

National Science Foundation Grant, SBE 2341555 (PI, Judith Kroll, PI, Co-PI, Michele Diaz): LangDiv: Two languages across the lifespan: Hypotheses about the sources of bilingual resilience over the lifespan, 2024-2025 ($149,999)

Selected Publications 

Kroll, J. F. (in press). Language in the minds and the brains of bilingual speakers reflects the diversity of the social world. In M.Gelfand, C.Y. Chiu, & Y.Y. Hong (Eds.), Advances in Culture and Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kroll, J. F., & Finger, I. (2023). Learning a new language in time: What does variation in bilingual experience tell us? Commentary on Caldwell-Harris and MacWhinney (2023): Age effects in second language acquisition: Expanding the emergentist account. Brain & Language, 246, 105340.

Kroll, J. F., & Rossi, E. (2023).  Models and metaphors: Mapping language experience to cognition. In J. Grundy, G. Luk, & J. Anderson.  Understanding Language and Cognition Through Bilingualism. Amsterdam, NL:  John Benjamins.

Navarro-Torres, C. A., Dussias, P.E., & Kroll, J. F. (2022). When exceptions matter:  When exceptions matter: Bilinguals regulate their dominant language to exploit structural constraints in sentence production.  Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience, 38(2), 217-242.

Kroll, J. F., & Mendoza, G. (2022). Bilingualism:  A cognitive and neural view of dual language experience. In O. Braddick (Ed.),  Oxford Research Encylopedia of Psychology.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Frederiksen, A. T., & Kroll, J. F. (2022).  Regulation and control: What bimodal bilimgualism reveals about learning and juggling two languages.  Languages, 7(3), 214.

Vargas Fuentes, N. A., Kroll, J. F., & Torres, J. (2022). What heritage bilinguals tell us about the language of emotion. Languages, 7(2), 144.

Navarro-Torres, C.A., Beatty-Martínez, A. L., Kroll, J. F., & Green, D. W. (2021).  Research on bilingualism as discovery science. Brain & Language, 222, 105014.

Kroll, J. F., Lamar Prieto, C., & Dussias, P.E. (2021).  Making a case for language study in the US:  When the social contexts and cognitive consequences of bilingualism align. In B. di Sabato & B. Hughes (Eds.), On Languages: Current Trends and Issues (pp. 156-174). Routledge.

Navarro-Torres, C.A., Beatty-Martínez, A. L., Kroll, J. F., & Green, D. W. (2021).  Research on bilingualism as discovery science. Brain & Language, 222, 105014.

Bice, K., & Kroll, J. F. (2021). Grammatical processing in two languages: How individual differences in language experience and cognitive abilities shape comprehension in heritage bilinguals.  Journal of Neurolinguistics, 58, 100963.

Beatty-Martínez, A. L.,  Navarro-Torres, C. A., Dussias, P.E., Bajo, M. T.,  Guzzardo-Tamargo, R., & Kroll, J. F. (2020).  Interactional context mediates the consequences of bilingualism for language and cognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 46, 1022–1047.

Green, D. W., & Kroll, J. F. (2019).  The neurolinguistics of bilingualism.  In G. de Zubicaray, & N. Schiller (Eds)., Oxford Handbook of Neurolinguistics.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Bice, K., & Kroll, J. F. (2019).  English only? Monolinguals in linguistically diverse contexts have an edge in language learning. Brain & Language.

Fricke, M.,  Zirnstein, M., Navarro-Torres, C., & Kroll, J. F. (2019).  Bilingualism reveals fundamental variation in language processing.  Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 22, 200-207.

Rossi, E., Newman, S., Kroll, J. F., & Diaz, M. (2018). Neural signatures of inhibitory control in bilingual spoken production.  Cortex, 108, 50-66.

Zirnstein, M., Van Hell, J. G., Kroll, J. F. (2018). Cognitive control ability mediates prediction costs in monolinguals and bilinguals. Cognition, 176, 87-106.

Kroll, J. F., & Dussias, P. E. (2016).  Language and productivity for all Americans: What are the benefits of multilingualism to the personal and professional development of residents of this country? Paper commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jacobs, A., Fricke, M., & Kroll, J. F. (2016). Cross-language activation begins during speech planning but extends into second language speech. Language Learning, 66, 324-353.

Fricke, M., Kroll, J. F., and Dussias, P. E. (2016). Phonetic variation in bilingual speech: A lens for studying the production–comprehension link.  Journal of Memory and Language, 89, 110-137

Bialystok, E., Abutalebi, J., Bak, T. H., Burke, D. M., & Kroll, J. F. (2016). Aging in two languages: Implications for public health.  Ageing Research Reviews, 27,  56-60.

Bjork, R. A., & Kroll, J. F. (2015).  Desirable difficulties in vocabulary learning. American Journal of Psychology, 128, 241-252.

Kroll, J. F. , Bobb, S. C., & Hoshino, N. (2014).  Two languages in mind:  Bilingualism as a tool to investigate language, cognition, and the brain. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 159-163.

Kroll, J. F., & Bialystok, E. (2013).  Understanding the consequences of bilingualism for language processing and cognition.  Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 25, 497-514.

Morford, J. P., Wilkinson, E., Villwock, A., Piñar, P. & Kroll, J. F. (2011). When deaf signers read English: Do written words activate their sign translations?  Cognition, 118,  286-292.

Guo, T., Liu, H., Misra, M., & Kroll, J. F. (2011). Local and global inhibition in bilingual word production: fMRI evidence from Chinese-English bilinguals. NeuroImage, 56, 2300-2309.

Linck, J. A., Kroll, J. F., & Sunderman, G. (2009). Losing access to the native language while immersed in a second language: Evidence for the role of inhibition in second language learning. Psychological Science, 20, 1507-1515.