Olga Kepinska

Olga Kepinska

Hello! I’m a linguist and a cognitive neuroscientist, currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Brain and Language Lab of Prof. Narly Golestani at the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub.

Prior to joining the Brain and Language Lab, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco and University of Connecticut in the US with Prof. Fumiko Hoeft. I obtained my PhD in Linguistics at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics in the Netherlands (2017), following a BA (University of Wroclaw, Poland) and MA (Leiden University) degrees in Dutch Studies and an MA in Linguistics from Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.

 

I’m interested in individual differences in (second) language acquisition from a neurocognitive perspective and the impact of brain development and complex environment on language skills.

 

My PhD focused on neural mechanisms and brain structures underlying successful foreign language learning. I investigated neural correlates of the analytical component of language aptitude using functional MRI, diffusion imaging and EEG. More recently, I was involved in a longitudinal neuroimaging study using cross-linguistic data to understand the impact of multilingualism on children’s cognitive and neural outcomes. My most recent work concentrates on language typology, its relation to multilingual language competence and neural signatures.