The Arizona Applied Psycholinguistics Lab (AAPL) is a collaborative research endeavor designed to bring together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates interested in studying how second and heritage languages (i.e., minority languages learned in a naturalistic context in infancy)—are learned and processed by the brain/mind. In the AAPL, we mainly focus on psycholinguistic methods with bilingual adults. Because of our location in a federally designated Hispanic Serving Institution, a great number of the lab’s current researchers and members study the acquisition and processing of Spanish as a heritage language. That said, AAPL also conducts research on the phonetics and psycholinguistics of bilingualism in any language combination.

Among the research questions we aim to address are:

• How are heritage and second languages represented in the minds of bilingual speakers?
• How do heritage and second language speakers process different aspects of language, such as its sound, word, sentence structure?
• How does linguistic processing change during language development (i.e., language acquisition) and language attrition (i.e., the process of language loss)?
• How do instructional interventions affect heritage and second language acquisition?

Answers to questions such as these offer profound insights into how the brain processes spoken and written language, how language has evolved to be optimally processed by the human brain/mind, how humans learn language beyond (or concurrent with) the first, and how computational systems can be designed to mimic human language learning processes.