Viorica Marian is a Moldovan-born American psycholinguist, cognitive scientist, and psychologist known for her research on bilingualism and multilingualism.
She first came to the United States as part of a high school delegation, returning a year later to attend college.
Viorica Marian was the last graduate student and mentee of American psychologist Ulric Neisser, widely regarded as the “Father of Cognitive Psychology.” Since 2000, Marian has been a professor at Northwestern University, where she currently holds the Ralph and Jean Sundin Endowed Chair in Communication Sciences and Disorders.
Marian was trained in eye-tracking by Michael Spivey, and in functional neuroimaging by Joy Hirsch, and was also influenced by Stephen Ceci, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Frank Keil, Joan Sereno, Daryl Bem, David Field, Carol Krumhansl, Thomas Gilovich, Shimon Edelman, and James Cutting while at Cornell.
At Emory, she was influenced by psychologists Philippe Rochat, Robyn Fivush, Eugene Winograd, Carolyn Mervis, John Pani, Michael Tomasello, Frans de Waal, and others.
Marian uses multiple approaches, including eye-tracking, EEG, fMRI, mouse-tracking, computational modeling, and cognitive tests to understand how bilingualism and multilingualism change human function.
Marian has since extended these findings to Spanish-English, German-English and even ASL-English bilinguals, the latter showing that co-activation of two languages can take place across modalities and relies not only on bottom-up, but also on top-down and lateral processes.
This work contributed to understanding how multiple cognitive perspectives and mental models co-exist within one mind and the role language may play in mediating these processes.
Marian and her students contributed to this area by showing a link between lexical co-activation in spoken comprehension, subsequent linguistic inhibition, and non-linguistic inhibitory control in bilinguals.
For example, English and Spanish speakers look at different objects when searching for the same item (e.g., clock) in identical visual displays.
These differences in looking patterns emerge despite an absence of direct linguistic input, suggesting that peoples’ lifelong experience with language can influence visual search.
Foreign editions of the book include: Marian graduated from college and started her PhD studies at the age of 19.