The journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition is pleased to welcome a new Editor-in-Chief, Annie C. Tremblay. We invite you to read more about Annie’s vision for the journal and the type of research she hopes will publish in the journal.

What’s your history with Bilingualism: Language and Cognition?

I have been involved with BLC for over a decade, serving on the Editorial Board since 2012 and as Associate Editor from 2021 to 2023. I have also contributed to the journal as an author through my research on bilingual speech perception, spoken word recognition, speech segmentation, and morphological processing. These roles have provided me with firsthand insight into BLC’s standards for theoretical rigor, methodological excellence, and a careful peer-review process that ensures high-quality publications.

What future directions (or initiatives) are you most looking forward to explore for BLC in the coming years?

I would like to enhance the quality and consistency of peer reviews by developing detailed reviewer guidelines and offering structured training opportunities for early-career scholars. I also hope to diversify the existing editorial board by involving more junior scholars working under the mentorship of senior editors or selected through careful vetting to ensure both continuity and innovation. In addition, I plan to expand the journal’s commitment to open science and open-access principles, including data sharing and reproducibility, to maximize transparency, accessibility, and the societal impact of bilingualism research. Finally, at a time when linguistics as a field is often challenged to demonstrate its broader relevance, I believe BLC can play a leading role by highlighting the translational impact of bilingualism research and encouraging authors to connect their findings to real-world applications in education, health, aging, and technology.

What types of research are you hoping to publish in BLC?

The majority of studies on bilingualism have focused on college-aged, highly educated participants, which limits the generalizability of their findings. I would like BLC to increase its attention to less commonly studied populations, such as older adults, adults with a wider range of education levels, and bimodal bilinguals, in the hope of identifying which findings are generalizable across populations and which are specific to a given population. I would also like the journal to feature work in under-researched areas such as speech perception and production in heritage speakers, predictive mechanisms in bilingual language processing, and language use in aging bilinguals. Finally, I would like to encourage submissions that apply advanced analytical approaches, including AI-based classification methods, to uncover nuanced patterns in bilingual language use.

What are some of the most exciting articles BLC has recently published?

That is a difficult question, as BLC consistently publishes innovative work, but a few recent papers stand out. One is Fernandes et al. (2025), “Bilingualism and aging independently impact language processing: Evidence from comprehension and production,” for its investigation of language use in older bilinguals. Another is Coco et al. (2025), “Moving to continuous classifications of bilingualism through machine learning trained on language production,” for its innovative methodological approach. A slightly older but highly influential paper is Emmorey et al. (2016), “Psycholinguistic, cognitive, and neural implications of bimodal bilingualism,” which has significantly advanced our understanding of bilingualism through the study of bimodal bilinguals. 

Dr. Annie C. Tremblay is a Professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Chicano Studies, Languages, and Linguistics at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is also the co-director of Bilingualism Matters @ El Paso. She obtained her PhD in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Hawaii in 2007. Her research investigates bilingual speech perception and spoken word recognition, with focus on the processing of prosody, lexical stress, and other suprasegmental phenomena. Her most recent research, funded by the National Science Foundation, investigates whether the cue-weighting theory of speech perception can provide a strong theoretical framework for understanding the listening difficulties that second-language learners encounter with lexical stress, and for developing training stimuli and methods to enhance the perceptual learning of lexical stress.

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