I study how people understand sentences—whether they’re using their first language or learning a new one. My research addresses the mental processes behind this, and how these processes vary across different languages and types of learner. Together with my colleagues in the Romance Lab, we focus on languages like Spanish, French, Catalan, Portuguese, and Italian. We use behavioral, eye-tracking, and neurophysiological methods to see what’s going on in the minds of people reading, speaking, or listening to language. We are especially curious about how kids and adults learn Romance languages, and how these languages mix and interact in multilingual environments.
- Psycholinguistics
- Romance Languages
- Second Language Processing
- Multilingualism
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Ph.D. Linguistics, 2014
University of Maryland
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B.A. Literature and Linguistics, 2009
University of Buenos Aires
News
- I will be on sabbatical from October 2025 until April 2026.
- I got promoted to Associate Professor in October 2024. Related interview (in German) [here]
- We continue looking at how possessive pronouns are processed across languages! The German Research Council extended our AGREE project for 3 more years. The research is being conducted in collaboration with Shravan Vasishth and João Veríssimo [read more]
Publications
Patil, U., Calvillo, J., Lago, S. , & Schumann, A. K. (2025). Quantifying word complexity for Leichte Sprache: A computational metric and its psycholinguistic validation. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Easy and Plain Language in Institutional Contexts (AI & EL/PL), pages 94–107, Geneva, Switzerland. European Association for Machine Translation.
Publication
Preprint
Data
Oltrogge, E., Veríssimo, J., Patil, U., & Lago, S. (2025). Memory retrieval and prediction interact in sentence comprehension: an experimental evaluation of a cue-based retrieval model. Journal of Memory and Language, 144, 1–20.
Publication
Data
Lago, S., Schulz, P., Rinke, E., Oltrogge, E., Dudschig, C., & Kaup, B. (2025). Insensitivity to truth-value in negated sentences: Does linear distance matter? Experiments in Linguistic Meaning, 3, 214–223.
Publication
Data
Teaching
Psycholinguistics of French and Spanish
Bachelor/Lehramt seminar, Goethe University Frankfurt
Introduction to statistics with R
Master's seminar at Goethe University Frankfurt
Eye-tracking in language processing
Master's seminar at Goethe University Frankfurt
Empirical research on language variation
Master's seminar at Goethe University Frankfurt
Multilingual research
Master's seminar at Goethe University Frankfurt /
Bachelor seminar at University of Potsdam
Cognitive foundations of learning
Bachelor/Lehramt seminar at Goethe University Frankfurt
Spanish and bilingualism
Bachelor/Lehramt seminar at Goethe University Frankfurt
Spanish, bilingualism and education
Bachelor/Lehramt seminar at Goethe University Frankfurt
Memory and language processing
Bachelor/Lehramt seminar at University of Maryland
Experimental methods in language acquisition and processing
Master's seminar at Goethe University Frankfurt
Contact
- sollago [at] em.uni-frankfurt.de
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Office
Institut für Romanische Sprachen und Literaturen
IG Farben, room 5.215
Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1
60629 Frankfurt am Main
Romance Lab
IG Farben, room 5.206
Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1
60629 Frankfurt am Main