Janina Camille Vargas
She is a PhD student supervised by Professor María del Pilar García Mayo at the University of the Basque Country. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in European Languages (Spanish and German) from the University of the Philippines (Diliman) in 2013. She also holds a master’s degree in Language Acquisition in Multilingual Settings from the University of the Basque Country (2019). At the same time, Janina has worked as a foreign language teacher of Spanish and English, as well as an English-Tagalog translator. Her PhD project focuses on the development of the multilingual mental lexicon of Tagalog-English-Spanish trilinguals. She was a short-term research fellow at the SFB 1287 at the University of Potsdam, collaborating on experiments on crosslinguistic syntactic priming and infant phonetic discrimination. She acted as a language consultant for the BATA project, a corpus-building and language acquisition project on Batangas Tagalog by the University of Zurich and De La Salle University.
Currently, she is working as Assistant Professor in the Department of European Languages at the University of the Philippines Diliman, and Profesora Colaboradora at the Instituto Cervantes Manila.
Research Interests
- bi-/multilingualism
- crosslinguistic influence
- crosslanguage effects
- mental lexicon
- foreign/third language acquisition
- psycholinguistics
Journal Papers
- Janina Camille Vargas, María del Pilar García Mayo. (2026) Investigating the role of previously acquired languages in L3 semantic access through long-term crosslanguage repetition priming. International Journal of Multilingualism. :-. Abstract
- Janina Camille Vargas, María del Pilar García Mayo. (2022) Lexical crosslinguistic influence in L3 Spanish by Tagalog–English bilinguals. Languages. 7:-. Abstract || PDF
Conference Papers
- Janina Camille Vargas, María del Pilar García Mayo. (2026) The roles of previously acquired languages in L3 semantic access views through a crosslanguage repetition priming task. International Association for Multilingualism – L3 conference Poznan (Poland). Abstract || PDF
- Janina Camille Vargas, María del Pilar García Mayo. (2025) Snapshots of a network: a peek on the multilingual mental lexicon using the word association task. 9th Workshop on Multilingual Acquisition, Processing and Use Madrid, Spain. Abstract
- Rowena Garcia, Jens Roeser, Janina Camille Vargas, Saffanah Fathin, Evan Kidd. (2024) Cross-linguistic structural priming: To what extent does word order prime across typologically different languages. 31st Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 31) University of Massachusetts Amherst. Abstract || PDF
- Janina Camille Vargas. (2024) From Form to Meaning: Looking at the Mental Lexicon Development of Tagalog-English-Spanish trilinguals. 21st Linguistics Conference for PhD students Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest. Abstract || PDF
- Janina Camille Vargas, María del Pilar García Mayo. (2023) The impact of extralinguistic factors on the lexical crosslinguistic influence in L3 Spanish by Tagalog-English bilinguals. XVI International Symposium of Psycholinguistics Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain). Abstract || PDF
- Janina Camille Vargas. (2023) The Developing Multilingual Mental Lexicon of Tagalog-English bilinguals. Summer School of Linguistics České Budějovice (Czechia). Abstract || PDF
- Janina Camille Vargas, María del Pilar García Mayo. (2022) Lexical crosslinguistic influence in L3 Spanish by Tagalog-English bilinguals. L3 Workshop 2022: Workshop on Multilingual Acquisition, Processing and Use London (UK). Abstract || PDF


