Jyotsna Vaid

Jyotsna Vaid is a Professor of Psychology and Women's and Gender Studies at Texas A&M University and an affiliated faculty of the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Vaid specializes in multiple language experience and cross-linguistic investigations, and has published extensively on the cognitive and neural bases of bi/multilingualism. More recently she is studying the influence of informal translation experience, or language brokering on psycholinguistic functioning. Other research she has conducted has examined the processing of jokes, spatial biases in cognition related to reading/writing direction, and characteristics of the language of personal advertisements. Most notably, Vaid's research in neuropsychology has clarified the role of the two cerebral hemispheres in bilingual language processing; her work shows that early onset of bilingualism is associated with more bilateral involvement in language, in contrast to the greater left hemisphere dominance for language among single language users.[1][2][3]

Vaid received a B.A. in biopsychology from Vassar College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from McGill University in experimental psychology. She completed two postdoctoral fellowships, one at Michigan State University and the other jointly at the Center for Research in Language at the University of California, San Diego, and at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, before joining Texas A&M, where she is currently a full professor in psychology and Director of the Language and Cognition Lab (see link below). For 10 years Vaid edited the Committee on South Asian Women (COSAW) Bulletin and in 2009 she co-founded the journal Writing Systems Research.