Background

Albert Costa was born in 1970 in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

Education

Albert Costa received his Master of Arts in Psychology from the University of Barcelona in 1993. In that year he was awarded a doctoral fellowship from the Spanish Government and enrolled in the program “Language and Cognitive Science” at the University of Barcelona where he received his Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology in 1997.

Career

In 1998, Albert Costa started his post-doctoral career at the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, due to the funding from the Catalan Government. From 1999 to 2000, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory at Harvard University with a Fulbright scholarship. In 2001, he moved to the Cognitive Neuroscience department at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste. From 2002 to 2005 Costa was a research fellow at the University of Barcelona funded by the Ramon y Cajal program. In 2006 he became an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology of the same university. Since 2008 Costa became a Research Professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies - Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

To address the issue of bilingualism, Costa conducted experiments using both classic experimental psychology techniques and brain imaging and electrophysiological techniques and studying both brain-damage individuals (patients with stroke and Alzheimer's disease) and healthy individuals. This multi-perspective assessment allowed him to gather new insights about the brain substrates of language control in bilingualism.

Achievements

• Albert Costa managed to achieve international recognition as one of the worlds' leading cognitive scientists in the sphere of bilingualism. The outcome of his research has had a strong impact on the scientific community interested in bilingualism, and some of the studies he published are amongst the most cited in the field.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Bilingual Brain: And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language

    (Over half of the world's population is bilingual and yet ...)

    2020

Views

Albert Costa's main area of research focuses on the cognitive and brain bases of bilingualism. Since 2010 he was particularly interested in understanding the cognitive processes that allow bilingual speakers to keep their two languages apart during speech production. In other words, how are bilinguals able to restrict their speech production to only one language while preventing massive interference from their other language.

The issue of how bilinguals control their two languages offers a natural context in which to study the interaction between language processing and attentional control. Since 2013 Costa devoted some effort in trying to understand whether bilingual language control has a collateral effect on other cognitive domains, such as attentional executive functions. The results of these studies offer a positive answer, suggesting that bilingualism may act as mental training that leads to benefits in the domain-general executive functions. An important part of Costa's later was focused on understanding how such cross-talk between different domains emerges. Costa and his colleagues aimed at discovering the link by studying the extent to which the brain structures engaged in attentional control are also recruited during bilingual language processing. Furthermore, to gather knowledge about how this benefit associated with bilingualism develops, we also test very young infants that have been exposed to one (monolingual infants) or to two languages (bilingual infants) in several executive control tasks.

Besides the scientific interest of the questions addressed in his research, Costa believed that understanding how two languages are represented in one brain (and the collateral consequences of bilingualism) is also of general social interest. Bilingualism is becoming the rule rather than the exception in many areas of the world and is certainly the linguistic situation in Catalonia. This fact raises many questions in modern societies such as: What are the consequences of bilingual as compared to monolingual education? Should the rehabilitation of patients with acquired language disorders focus on one or two languages? Does bilingualism act as a positive factor delaying the appearance of dementia symptoms?

Personality

Albert Costa managed to make a lot of friends among the numerous researchers he worked with. Some of his friends characterized him as a mixture or a hybrid of English Lord and truck driver. He also remembered to be always polite and attentive but with a rebel and irreverent point.

Connections

Albert Costa had children.

Friend:

Alfonso Caramazza