Research interests:
- Typical and atypical language development in multicultural/bilingual children, with a particular emphasis on Spanish-English
- Development of culturally and linguistic valid assessment and treatment procedures in monolingual and bilingual children
- First language loss in bilingual children and grammatical learning in monolingual Spanish and bilingual Spanish-English speaking typical and atypical children
I am interested in the intersectionality between the process of language development in child dual language learners and social factors that impact language input and use. As such, I am interested in studying, via both spontaneous discourse and experimental paradigms, children's grammatical skill in both languages and how these intersect or are impacted by child-internal factors (e.g., ability/disability) and child-external factors (e.g., quality of language input, variation in input), as well as how different aspects of language are interrelated, if at all.
I conduct research in the areas of typical and atypical language development in Spanish-speaking children and in children from dual language backgrounds. Although I am interested in studying dual language learners in general, most of my research centers on Spanish-English speaking children who have learned English sequentially. My research centers on describing the grammatical skills of Spanish speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI).
I teach in the areas of child second language acquisition/disorders, social factors related to communication disorders, language diversity, and atypical language development and disorders.
Subject Area: Speech & Hearing
