João Veríssimo

I'm a researcher in psycholinguistics. My research focuses on how complex words are mentally represented, processed, and learned by both monolingual and bilingual speakers. The main theoretical topics I address with my work are: (a) the development and comparison of formal and computational models of the mental lexicon, and (b) the role of age of acquisition as a source of contrasts between native speakers and second language learners.

I work as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Potsdam Research Institute for Multilingualism of the University of Potsdam, Germany.

I am also a statistical advisor for Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.

Here is a complete and updated CV. You can also find me on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.

Please contact me by email, if you have any questions.

Recent publications

(click here for a full list)


  • Pañeda, C., Lago, S., Vares, E., Veríssimo, J., & Felser, C. (in press). Island effects in Spanish comprehension. Glossa.
  • Ruberg, T., Rothweiler, M., Veríssimo, J., & Clahsen, H. (2019, online). Childhood bilingualism and Specific Language Impairment: A study of the CP-domain in German SLI. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. [doi]
  • Wulff, D. U., De Deyne, S., Jones, M. N., . . . Veríssimo, J. & Mata, R. (2019). New perspectives on the aging lexicon. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23, 686–698. [doi]
  • Clahsen, H., & Veríssimo, J. (2019, reprint). Investigating grammatical processing in bilinguals: The case of morphological priming. In I. A. Sekerina, L. Spradlin & V. Valian (Eds.), Bilingualism, executive function, and beyond: Questions and insights (pp. 117–130). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [From Clahsen & Veríssimo, 2016] [doi]
  • Bosch, S., Veríssimo, J., & Clahsen, H. (2019). Inflectional morphology in bilingual language processing: An age-of-acquisition study. Language Acquisition, 26, 339–360. [doi]
  • Farhy, Y., & Veríssimo, J. (2019). Semantic effects in morphological priming: The case of Hebrew stems. Language and Speech, 62, 737–750. [doi]
  • Pliatsikas, C.*, Veríssimo, J.*, Babcock, L., Pullman, M. Y., Glei, D. A., . . . & Ullman, M. T. (2019). Working memory in older adults declines with age, but is modulated by sex and education. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72, 1308–1327. [*Equal contribution] [doi]