Merel Keijzer

Merel Keijzer works at the department of Applied Linguistics, where she specializes in the language and cognitive control of bilinguals across the lifespan.

She received her PhD in Linguistics from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and subsequently took up an Assistant Professor position of English as a Second Language at Delft University of Technology. From 2008 to 2013 she was an Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at Utrecht University, where she also carried out a VENI project on the language dominance shift and associated language and cognitive control among elderly Dutch emigrants in Australia. Just prior to coming to Groningen, she spent a year as visiting professor at the Center for Language Science at the Pennsylvania State University.

In her work, she tries to integrate bilingual language learning and loss as dynamic processes of growth and decline that occur throughout a bilingual's lifespan. Employing both behavioral and neuroimaging techniques, she is especially interested in establishing how individual bilingual experiences (taking into account factors such as age of acquisition, contexts and extent of use, but also intraspeaker variables like available cognitive resources) impact on bilingual language development and the bilingual cognitive advantage that is frequently reported.