Kelly’s examiners, Professor Jason Rothman (Lancaster) and Professor Vince DeLuca (Tromsø), recommended that the degree of PhD be awarded with only minor revisions, a reflection of the high quality of Kelly’s PhD work.

Kelly’s dissertation focused on the “Lexical selection in Mandarin-English bilingual speakers." Across four experiments, Kelly investigated how language context and task demands influence the inhibitory control and flexibility of bilingual speakers during language switching. The findings revealed that language switch costs are dynamic, influenced by both the predominant language in use and the type of language production task. Additionally, results confirmed that switching to a second language (L2) requires greater cognitive effort. Overall, the thesis highlights the adaptive nature of bilingual language control.

We are very grateful to our examiners for taking the time to assess Kelly’s dissertation and for the valuable feedback!

Kelly was jointly supervised by Dr. Aina Casaponsa and Professor Patrick Rebuschat (both Linguistics).