About Me 

I’m a third-year PhD student in Linguistics at Boston University, whose research interest intertwines between bilingualism, language acquisition, and semantics. My research centers on two main areas. 

First, I explore how early vs. late bilingualism shapes the sounds of language, especially within heritage speaker communities. 

Second, I’m fascinated by how the smallest elements of language such as (in)definiteness markers, carry meanings that go beyond the English the or a.

 Currently, I’m concurrently working on two projects. One of which is investigating how Akan-English heritage speakers produce vowel harmony patterns, as a way of understanding how language contact influences the language acquisition of heritage language learning and maintenance for my first Qualifying Paper. 

Second, I’m re-examining definiteness marking in Akan, showing that its meanings extend beyond the strict Schwarzian strong vs weak distinction. In particular, I analyze definites as functioning like quasi-demonstratives and bare nouns as quasi-titles, in collaboration with Prof.Elizabeth Coppock and Dr. Augustina Owusu. 

Outside of academia, I enjoy cooking, singing, and spending quality time with my family.

Contact info

rdbonney@bu.edu / rebeccadufieforson@gmail.com

Find Me Here

I am a member of the Structures of Under-researched Languages(SuLa), Linguistic Semantics Lab(LisLab) and The Phonetics, Acquisition & Multilingualism Lab (PAMLab)