Early bilingual experiences have an enduring impact in children’s brain development and cognition. In this talk, I will present a series of studies on how bilingual environments impact infants’ and children’s performance of cognitive functions and their functional representation in the brain. Through this work, I will walk you through my academic road path and how different “stops and turns” led my research interests on bilingualism to evolve in new ways. At each “stop”, I will provide brief overviews of the research. First, I will start with my undergraduate research investigating the cognitive effects on bilingual children. Followed by my work in graduate school investigating the brain bases of language processing and attention mechanisms in bilingual school-age children. I will continue by describing my postdoctoral work investigating the impact of bilingualism on attention during infancy. Lastly, I will end with my current work investigating the cognitive mechanisms that support bilingual toddlers’ word learning.
