BabelBrain - Mapping multilingual ecologies
The BabelBrain Team
M. Carmen Parafita Couto (PI)
✉ mcarmen.parafita.couto@usc.gal
ORCID: 0000-0001-7306-3393
M. Carmen Parafita Couto is currently an ATRAE Distinguished Researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Until August 2025, she was University Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, where she continues to be affiliated as a Guest Researcher. She earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Kansas (USA) in 2005. Her research focuses on understanding multilingual practices, with a particular emphasis on code-switching, which she investigates through comparative, cross-community approaches that explore its structural, social, and cognitive dimensions. She has worked with diverse multilingual communities in contexts ranging from Europe and the Americas to West Africa. She has co-organized numerous conferences and workshops on code-switching such as the Lorentz Workshop on Key debates in code-switching research (Leiden, 2018), the SMART Cognitive Science Workshop: Code-switching, syntactic theory and cognition (Amsterdam/Leiden, 2021) or Advancing code-switching research (Vigo, 2022).
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Lucía Vieitez Portas (Postdoctoral researcher)
ORCID: 0000-0002-4883-2362
Lucía Vieitez Portas is a postdoctoral researcher in the BabelBrain project (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela). She obtained her PhD in Experimental Psychology in 2025, with a dissertation entitled "Neural and behavioural correlates of gender agreement processing in emotional words". Her research examines how variables such as word emotionality, gender type (arbitrary or natural/biological), and gender value or class (e.g., feminine and masculine), as well as inter-individual differences, affect gender agreement processing. Her work is intrinsically interdisciplinary, integrating approaches from Psychology, Linguistics, and Cognitive Neuroscience.
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Sabela Morais Martínez (Predoctoral researcher - PhD student)
✉ sabela.morais.martinez@usc.gal
Sabela Morais Martinez holds a Bachelor’s degree in Language Sciences and Literary Studies from Universidade de Vigo and a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics jointly awarded by the Universidade de Vigo, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, and Universidade da Coruña. She is currently a PhD student in Linguistics at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and a member of the BabelBrain project, which focuses on the study of multilingualism in Galicia and Gibraltar, led by Principal Investigator M. Carmen Parafita Couto. She has presented her work at several international conferences, including the Congreso Internacional de Lingüística General (2023, Universidad Complutense de Madrid; 2025, Universidad de Alicante).
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Hugo Parra (Predoctoral researcher - PhD student)
Hugo Parra completed a Bachelor’s in Linguistics at Université de Lille and a Master’s degree in Linguistics at Université Lyon Lumière 2. He is currently a PhD student in Linguistics at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC) and is a member of the BabelBrain project, which focuses on analyzing multilingualism in Galicia and Gibraltar, led by Principal Investigator M. Carmen Parafita Couto. He has also participated in the PHC Franco-Thaï research project, in collaboration with CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and the University of Chiang Mai, focusing on multilingual practices in the city of Chiang Mai.
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