Background
Albert Costa was born in 1970 in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585, 08007 Barcelona, Spain
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.
2016
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Albert Costa speaking at TEDxBarcelona in 2016.
2017
Portrait photo of Albert Costa.
Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 585, 08007 Barcelona, Spain
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.
Portrait photo of Albert Costa.
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Portrait photo of Albert Costa at his desk.
Portrait photo of Albert Costa.
Portrait photo of Albert Costa speaking.
Portrait photo of Albert Costa.
(Over half of the world's population is bilingual and yet ...)
Over half of the world's population is bilingual and yet few of us understand how this extraordinary, complex ability really works. How do two languages co-exist in the same brain? What are the advantages and challenges of being bilingual? How do we learn - and forget - a language? In the first study of its kind, leading expert Albert Costa shares twenty years of experience to explore the science of language. Looking at studies and examples from Canada to France to South Korea, The Bilingual Brain investigates the significant impact of bilingualism on daily life from infancy to old age. It reveals, among other things, how babies differentiate between two languages just hours after birth, how accent affects the way in which we perceive others and even why bilinguals are better at conflict resolution. Drawing on cutting-edge neuro-linguistic research from his own laboratory in Barcelona as well from centers across the world, and his own bilingual family, Costa offers an absorbing examination of the intricacies and impact of extraordinary skill. Highly engaging and hugely informative, The Bilingual Brain leaves us all with a sense of wonder at how language works.
https://www.amazon.com/Bilingual-Brain-Tells-Science-Language-ebook/dp/B07MWTL58L
2020
linguist neuropsychologist scientist author congnitivist
Albert Costa was born in 1970 in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
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.
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.
(Over half of the world's population is bilingual and yet ...)
2020Albert 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?
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.
Albert Costa had children.