Sayaka Sato

Sayaka Sato is a Part-Time Lecturer at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Fribourg. She works within the Psycholinguistique & Psychologie Sociale team, focusing on cognitive and psycholinguistic research.

• University: University of Fribourg
• School: Faculty of Philosophy
• Department: Department of Psychology
• Academic Rank: PartTime Lecturer

Her research explores the intersection of psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, particularly how grammatical structures influence gender perception, inclusive language, bilingualism, and the embodiment of action-related language. Key themes include linguistic relativity, second language acquisition, and the cognitive processing of grammatical gender systems.

Recent publications highlight her interdisciplinary approach, combining neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and social psychology to analyze topics like grammaticalization of the future tense in health communication, inclusive language impacts on gender visibility, and neural correlates of embodied semantics in multilingual contexts.

Sayaka Sato collaborates with researchers across Switzerland and Europe, contributing to experimental linguistics and gender studies. Her work has appeared in journals such as Cognition, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, and Frontiers in Psychology.

As a lecturer, she contributes to teaching activities in the Faculty of Philosophy, with a focus on psychology-related courses. She is affiliated with the Psycholinguistique & Psychologie Sociale team, advancing research on language-cognition interactions.