Researchers

Maki Kubota is currently a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Minho. She obtained her PhD in Linguistics and English Language from the University of Edinburgh. She is currently a PI on the Marie Curie Horizon Europe project: Re-exposure Effect in Bilinguals under Language Development (REBUILD)-The Acquisition of Heritage Language in Returnee Children and Mutual Effects of Experience and Cognition. Her research interest includes: child bilingualism, language attrition, relationship between cognition and language, heritage language development, and language learning motivation and attitude.

Projects

• 2024 - ... (Coordenador)

  Re-exposure Effect in Bilinguals under Language Development (REBUILD)-The Acquisition of Heritage Language in Returnee Children and Mutual Effects of Experience and Cognition

  Re- exposure Effect in Bilinguals Under Language Development (REBUILD) propose a novel approach that combines offline and online methods and focuses on a severely understudied, yet crucially important group of heritage speaker bilinguals (HSs; bilinguals who acquire a minority language at home, different from the majority societal language in which they are growing up), namely returnees. Returnees are children of immigrant families who spend a significant portion of their formative developmental years (school age) in a foreign majority language context, a typical HL scenario, yet return to their native HL environment, often as older children or teenagers. While research shows that HL bilingualism (HLB) grammatical outcomes vary significantly, findings are largely limited to contexts in which children grow up and stay in an environment where the native HL is a minority language. Environment transitions—as in the case of returnees—open an exciting opportunity to tease apart internal (grammatical structure, non-linguistic cognitive abilities) and external factors (input, use) accounting for HLB.

Publications

Articles

• Sandstedt, J., Kubota, M., Anderssen, M., Darby, J. A., Helset, S., Tavakoli, E., Vangsnes, Ø. A., & Rothman, J. (2025). Bidialectal language representation and processing: Evidence from Norwegian ERPs. Journal of Memory and Language, 140, 104557.

• Soilemezidi, M., Kubota, M., Chrisikopoulou, M., Fyndanis, V. (2024).  Independent effects of age, education, verbal working memory, motor speed of processing, locality and morphosyntactic category on verb-related morphosyntactic production: Evidence from healthy aging. Topics in Cognitive Science.

• Kubota, M., Matsuoka, Y., & Rothman, J. (2024). The acquisition of the semantics of Japanese numeral classifiers: The methodological value of nonsense. Journal of Child Language. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000923000661

• Laméris, T.J., Kubota, M., Kupisch, T., Cabrelli, J., Snape, N., Rothman, J., (2024). Language change in Japanese-English bilingual returnee children over the course of five years: evidence from accent-rating. Second Language Research.

• Kubota, M., González Alonso, J., Jensen, N. I., Luque, A., Pereira Soares, S. M., Prystauka, Y., Vangsnes, Ø., Anderssen, M., Sandstedt, J., & Rothman, J. (2023). Bidialectal Exposure Modulates Neural Signatures to Conflicting Grammatical Properties: Norway as a Natural Laboratory. Language Learning. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12608

• Kubota, M., Hadley, L., Schäffner, S., Könen, T., Meaney, J.-A., Auyeung, B., Morey, C., Moriguchi, Y., Karbach, J., & Chevalier, N. (2023). The effect of metacognitive executive function training on children's executive function, proactive control, and academic skills. Developmental Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001626

• Di Pisa, G., Kubota, M., Marinis, T., & Rothman, J. (2022). Effects of markedness in gender processing in Italian as a Heritage Language: a speed-accuracy tradeoff. Frontiers in Psychology, 13:965885. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.965885

• Luque, A., Rossi, E., Kubota, M., Nakamura, M., Rosales, C., López-Rojo, C., Rodina, Y., & Rothman, J. (2023). Morphological Transparency and Markedness Matter in Heritage Speaker Gender Processing: An EEG Study. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1114464.

• Rothman, J., Bayram, F., DeLuca, V., Di Pisa, G., Duñabetia, J.A., Gharibi, K., Hao, J., Kolb, N., Kubota, M., Kupisch, T., Laméris, T., Luque, A., van Osch, B., Pereira Soares,S., Prystauka, Y., Taz, D., Tomic, A., Voits, T., & Wulff, S. (2022). Monolingual comparative normativity in (heritage language) empirical bilingualism research is out of “control”: Arguments and alternatives. Applied Psycholinguistics. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716422000315.

• Kubota, M., Chondrogianni, V., Clark, A., & Rothman, J. (2022). Linguistic consequences of toing and froing: Factors that affect the maintenance and development in returnee bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 25(7), 2363-2381. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2021.1910621.

• Pereira Soares, S. M., Kubota, M., Rossi, E., & Rothman, J. (2021). Determinants of bilingualism catalyse dynamic changes in resting state EEG oscillations. Brain and Language, 223, 105030. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2021.105030.

• Bayram, F., Kubota, M., Luque, A., Pascual y Cabo, D., & Rothman, J. (2021). You can’t fix what is not broken: Contextualizing the imbalance of perceptions about heritage language bilingualism. Frontiers in Education. 6:628311.https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.628311.

• Kubota, M., Heycock, C., Sorace, A., & Rothman, J. (2020). Cross-Linguistic Influence  on L2 before and after extreme reduction in input: The case of Japanese returnee children. Frontiers in Psychology, 11:560874. https://doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.560874.

• Kubota, M., Chevalier, N., & Sorace, A. (2020). Losing access to the second language and its effect on executive function development in childhood: the case of ‘returnees’, Journal of Neurolinguistics, 55, p.100906. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2020.100906.

• Kubota, M., Hadley, L., Schäffner, S., Könen, T., Meaney, J.-A., Auyeung, B., Morey, C., Karbach, J., & Chevalier, N. (2020). Proactive control during childhood: consistent use and relation with academic achievement. Cognition, 203, 104329. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104329.

• Kubota, M., Chevalier, N., & Sorace, A. (2019). How bilingual experience and executive control influence development in language control among bilingual children, Developmental Science, 23(1), p.e12865. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12865.

• Kubota, M. (2017). Post study abroad investigation of kanji knowledge in Japanese as a second language learners. System, 69, 143-152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2017.07.006.

• Kubota, M. (2015). Kanji Error Analysis of Learners of Japanese as a Second Language. The British Association for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language Journal, 16, 48-53.

Book chapters

• Rothman, J., Bayram, F., DeLuca, V., González Alonso, J., Kubota, M., & Puig-Mayenco, E. (2023). Defining bilingualism as a continuum: Some tools and consequences for the study of bilingual mind and brain effects. In G. Luk, J. Grundy, & J. Anderson (Eds.), Understanding Language and Cognition Through Bilingualism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

• Flores, C. & Kubota, M. L3 attrition in returnees. (2023). In J. Cabrelli, A. Chaouch-Orozco, J. G. Alonso., S. M. Pereira Soares, E. Puig-Mayenco, J. Rothman (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Third Language Acquisition and Processing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Schaeffner, S., Chevalier, N., Kubota, M., & Karbach, J. (2021). Meta-cognitive training. In T. Strobach & J. Karbach (Eds.), Cognitive Training: An Overview of Features and Applications. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

• Kubota, M. (2019). Referential expression and cognitive control in Japanese-English bilingual children. Proceedings of the 14th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition (GASLA 2017). MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.