Esti Blanco-Elorrieta
The Society for the Neurobiology of Language is pleased to announce the 2025 Early Career Award recipient: Esti Blanco-Elorrieta
The Early Career Award is generously sponsored by Brain and Language
The neurobiology of the bilingual mind
Friday, September 12, 2025, 10:00 - 11:00 am, Elstad Auditorium
Speaker: Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, New York University (NYU)
About Esti Blanco-Elorrieta
Dr. Blanco-Elorrieta is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, where they lead the Neuroscience of Multilingualism Laboratory. They obtained their PhD in 2020 from New York University, completed a postdoc at Harvard, and have quickly established themselves as a leading figure in the neuroscience of language, with an outstanding publication record—29 articles, most in top-tier journals—alongside $1.7 million in grant funding and widespread international recognition, including the Glushko Dissertation Prize from the Cognitive Science Society and selection for the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science list in 2019. Beyond their research achievements, Dr. Blanco-Elorrieta has been a dedicated contributor to our community, attending nearly every SNL annual meeting and serving on our Board of Directors as trainee representative during their graduate and postdoctoral years.
Esti Blanco-Elorrieta’s research program centers on the hypothesis that the neural organization of the bilingual mind constitutes an integrated system of two (or more) languages. The main tenets of the theory were articulated in their 2021 theoretical position article (Elorrieta & Caramazza, 2021. Cognition), proposing that language selection operates through activation-based mechanisms without requiring suppression of the non-target language. The model extends beyond the lexicon to semantic, syntactic, morphological, and phonological levels, offering a computationally grounded account of bilingual speech both in and outside experimental contexts.
To test the predictions of the model, Blanco-Elorrieta has conducted several distinct lines of research,
combining neuroimaging, aphasiology and computational modelling. A key strength of their work is that it has always systematically addressed both comprehension and production, often within the same study, with elegant designs that engage the same representations across both, which is notoriously difficult to accomplish.