I am  a Linguistics Ph.D. student at UofA. My main research interests are language processing, language acquisition, pronoun resolution, and implicit causality. Currently I am investigating the role of information structure on pronoun resolution in semantically biased contexts. In the Heritage Lab I am part of the project that studies cross-linguistic influence with Spanish-English bilinguals.

Zhuo (Rhodri) is a PhD student at the University of Alberta, where he works with Dr. Daskalaki. He holds an MA in Linguistics from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Before joining the University of Alberta, he worked with CUHK’s Childhood Bilingualism Research Center, investigating trilingual language acquisition among children in Hong Kong and mainland China. His current research focuses on heritage language acquisition, particularly vulnerable linguistic domains across languages. 

Hi! I’m Sena, an international MSc student in Linguistics. My main area of research is heritage language maintenance. My awareness of the significance of HLM arose after coming into contact with speakers of endangered heritage languages in Türkiye and hearing their concerns about how their languages are no longer being spoken by younger generations. Putting empathy in them absolutely horrified me. As a mother tongue advocate, I dream of being a means of preserving languages and cultures! And that’s why I’m here :)

“If you talk to a person in a language they understand, that goes to their head. If you talk to them in their mother tongue, you go straight to their heart.”

Hello! My name is Phoebe 林悅加 (lam4 jyut6 gaa1) and I am an undergraduate student studying Linguistics and East Asian Studies with a minor in Psychology. As a self-proclaimed chef of Cantonese food and speaker of Cantonese, I have a soft spot for regional languages of Chinese and multilingualism in Chinese speakers. My research interests involve the heritage language acquisition and maintenance of Chinese languages as well as crosslinguistic influence of language structures in bilinguals.  

I’m an undergraduate in linguistics with a minor in computing science. Being a heritage speaker of Russian and learning French has informed my interest in language acquisition, especially when it comes to heritage speakers, and individual factors affecting it. I enjoy the morphosyntactic and phonological sides of linguistics the most. Currently, I’m involved in a project on the bilingual development of displaced Ukrainian children.  

I am currently working on my undergrad in linguistics with a minor in psychology and have had the opportunity to engage with projects at the HeritLab that align with my interest in heritage language transmission and preservation! Specifically, I am interested in the role of attitudinal factors (cultural pride, social identity etc.) that shape language transmission within families and communities as well as the impacts of willingness seen from the caregiver of passing down a heritage language.