I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communications Sciences and Disorders at the Pennsylvania State University. My research focuses on the study of typical and atypical language development and language processing in child and adult bilingual populations.  My interest in language development takes a social-interactionist approach to the study of typical and atypical language development in bilingual children, with special interest in the socio-cultural aspects of language and literacy development. In particular, I am interested in bilingual children’s development of narrative constructions as precursors to early literacy skills, as well as in the effects of lexical neighborhood density and cross-linguistic transfer of phonological skills in bilinguals' word-level decoding. My interest in language processing takes a psycholinguistic approach to the study of language comprehension and production in bilingual adults and children, with emphasis on on-line measures (i.e. ERP and eye tracking). In particular, I am interested in the visual word recognition paradigm as a lens for examining word-level decoding processes in bilinguals who have been exposed to both a shallow and a deep orthography. I am also interested in the role of inhibitory control in bilinguals’ lexical retrieval. Lab Affiliation: The Brain, Language, and Literacy Laboratory Research Keywords: Bilingualism, Literacy, Language Processing, Language Development and Disorders |
Research Interests |