Renan Ferreira

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPEL-Brazil). My main research interest is bilingual cognition — particularly how bilinguals process meaning in a second or foreign language, and how prior linguistic experience shapes conceptualization during language use. 

My current work, developed in collaboration with researchers at McMaster University (Canada), examines how Portuguese–English bilinguals process motion events in English during reading. Using experimental methods, I investigate how conceptual representations may be reorganized through bilingual experience. 

Alongside this, I work with eye-movement corpora to study reading in Brazilian Portuguese, combining eye-tracking data with LLMs and other computational tools to investigate how text genre shapes language processing. I also teach graduate and undergraduate courses in psycholinguistics, bilingualism, applied linguistics and quantitative methods at UFPEL, and I am a trained ESL instructor. 

Although my work centres on the psycholinguistics of bilingualism, my interests extend further: to the use of AI tools in language teaching and learning, to sociolinguistic questions about attitudes toward languages and language science, and to language teacher training.