Research projects and publications 

Ungrading in intermediate-level Spanish courses. This is a joint pedagogical project with Christina Beaubien of Westfield State University, for which we received an ACTFL Research Priorities 2021 grant. In this action research project, we explore the creation and implementation of contract-based ungrading in 3rd and 4th semester Spanish classes at our respective universities in order to analyze the effect of this assessment approach on motivation and student perception of equity in the evaluation process and in language practices. You can view our presentation on Ungrading for Equity at the USC Dornsife conference, Grading Less - Learning More: Ungrading in World Languages, Cultures, and Literatures here. We also have an article to appear in Language Teaching Research and a forthcoming chapter in an edited volume on ungrading in the world language classroom.

Developing Equitable Assessment Practices in Open Educational Resources. With support of a K-State Open/Alternative Textbook grant, I developed a new curriculum for the fourth-semester Spanish course that focuses on Hispanic issues connected to the Great Plains region of the United States. This resource has been developed as part of an ungrading pedagogy, the research explores how curriculum content and pedagogical implementation affect students' perception of equity, their motivation, and autonomy. I received a 2023-2024 Open Education Research Fellowship in support of this project. 

The Effect of Educational Experiences on the use, attitudes, and maintenance of Asturian. I am collaborating with María Turrero García to examine educational instruction approach on Asturian language use and maintenance.  

Grammatical Gender Assignment by Heritage Speakers. One of my current investigations examines assignment of the grammatical gender feature by heritage speakers. Using the same methodology as my dissertation, I hope to further explore optionality in gender agreement relations among Spanish-English bilingual speakers. I aim to find if Heritage speakers ever use morphosyntactic agreement rules from English and, if so, in what contexts.

Feature Reassembly & Grammatical Gender Constraints in L1 & L2 Spanish speakers. With Luiz Amaral, this work investigates how the grammatical gender feature is represented and (re)assembled in native and non-native speakers of Spanish, examining how native speakers of Spanish, English, and Brazilian Portuguese implement Spanish gender agreement constraints and the contexts in which non-target gender is produced. You can view some of our work related to this topic that we presented for the Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics Virtual Collquium talk on the subjet here and access our 2024 article published with Hispanic Studies Review here.  

El procesamiento de género con sustantivos inventados: sintaxis, morfología y la lengua materna / Gender processing with nonce nouns: syntax, morphology, and the mother tongue. This article, published in 2022 in Semas: Revista de lingüística teórica y aplicada, examines the effect of syntactic cues present on the article, morphological cues present on the noun, and the first language of American English and Brazilian Portuguese speakers in their L2 Spanish using a self-paced reading paradigm to measure reaction times. Results indicate that deceptively marked nouns (feminine nouns ending in -o / masculine nouns ending in -a) yield a processing cost among the Portuguese-speaking group, but English speakers show no effect for noun morphology, a result that runs counter to findings in production studies.

Gender feature re-assembly: L1 and L2 pronoun resolution of epicene and bigender antecedents. In collaboration with Luiz Amaral and Marcus Maia (2021), we argue that a full-fledged feature-based lexicalist syntactic theory allows us to better represent the possible configurations of features in the learner's interlanguage. We describe gender agreement in Spanish using Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and use it to analyze the results of a self-paced reading test with L1 and L2 speakers. The detailed descriptions in terms of feature specification allow us to observe in more fined-grained detail the differences between the L1 and L2 grammars and represent optionality at the lexical level.

Using online translators for linguistic analysis. After countless conversations with language instructors and language learners alike, it has become abundantly clear that there is a lot of frustration surrounding Online Translator use in the L2 classroom! Instructors are discouraged with what they see as student abuse of these tools and students are confused about online translator policies. In this collaborative effort with Dr. María Turrero-García, we examine instructor and student attitudes related to Online Translators and apply classroom treatments to employ online translators as pedagogical tool in the language-learning process. We have published some of our work on this topic with the FLTMAG.

Emotions and L2 lexical learning. In collaboration with María Turrero-García (published 2018), this project investigates how positive, negative, and neutral emotional contexts affect L2 speakers' accuracy rates when learning new lexical items. Initial findings suggest that positive contexts facilitate lexical learning over neutral and negative contexts.

Asturian mass noun agreement. This project is an investigation of the Asturian mass noun agreement feature (often referred to as neutro de materia). The syntactic and semantic aspects of the agreement phenomenon were analyzed using Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and used to make predictions about how this feature might manifest itself in the Spanish of the region. These predictions are then verified using data from the COSER corpus.

Dissertation Research

My dissertation project explored assignment of grammatical gender to novel (i.e., invented) nouns by native and non-native (L1 English & L1 Portuguese) Spanish speakers. I am drawn to grammatical gender for its value as a complex interface feature, present in the syntactic, semantic, morphological, and lexical domains. I use novel nouns to investigate this feature as they allow me to manipulate the syntactic and morphological features and ensure that previous exposure plays no part in participants' use of these words. 

You can find my publication citations on my Google Scholar profile.