Gisela Granena
Gisela Granena is an SLA researcher based at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona, and one of the researchers who pushed the language-aptitude literature past the 1960s MLAT framework into a serious cognitive account. Her work argues that aptitude is not a single construct but at least two: an explicit analytic ability that helps with rule-based learning and an implicit aptitude for tracking distributional and transitional probabilities in input.
The methodological payoff is a pair of instruments that now do most of the field's aptitude work. LLAMA, especially LLAMA_D, is widely used as a measure of implicit aptitude, and her construct-validity papers in Studies in Second Language Acquisition have shaped how researchers interpret and report LLAMA scores. The Hi-LAB battery developed out of related work and is the most comprehensive implicit-aptitude measure currently in use. Her 2013 edited volume with Michael Long, Sensitive Periods, Language Aptitude, and Ultimate L2 Attainment, is the standard reference linking aptitude research to age-effects research.
Career
- Researcher at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona
- Collaborations with University of Maryland on aptitude and implicit learning
- Active in the Maryland/UOC aptitude-research network
Published Work
- Sensitive Periods, Language Aptitude, and Ultimate L2 Attainment (ed. with Long, 2013, Benjamins)
- Implicit Language Aptitude (Cambridge)
- "Cognitive aptitudes and L2 speaking proficiency: Links between LLAMA and Hi-LAB"
- Construct-validity papers on LLAMA_D in Studies in Second Language Acquisition
Influence
- Reframed language aptitude as a multi-component construct with distinct implicit and explicit dimensions
- Contributed to the widely used LLAMA and Hi-LAB instruments now standard in aptitude research
- Central interlocutor on the aptitude-age interaction debate