This two year fellowship for postdoctoral study will allow Dr. Heredia the opportunity to obtain training in the analysis of linguistic structure and language processing at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Heredia's research interests have been on bilingual memory representations. During his postdoctoral tenure he will learn new techniques for the `on-line` (real-time) study of language processing and be exposed to new theoretical frameworks for understanding linguistic structure. The research will involve comparing real-time processing in young bilinguals with performance by elderly adults and patients with Alzheimer's Disease. Alzheimer's bilingual subjects will be tested to see whether their memory deficits are due to the deterioration of their memory structures, or alternatively, as a result of their memory processes deficits (e.g., data-driven vs. conceptually-driven processes). In constructing bilingual or monolingual models of memory representation, the ultimate goal is to understand the architecture of cognition. Both bilingual and monolingual research helps us to understand it. Work on bilingual lexical and semantic processing attempts to understand bilingual semantic memory by applying and extending existing work on monolingual aging Alzheimer's patients to bilingualism.
