My research focuses on the early language experience of deaf children in the United States and in Guatemala. In my current project, I am focused on the language development of deaf and hard of hearing children in early elementary school classrooms in the United States. Using a corpus of video data collected at the Center on Literacy and Deafness at Georgia State University, I am exploring the ways that deaf children develop language skills in classrooms taught in either American Sign Language (ASL) or spoken English. I am particularly interested in the ways that teachers support students' pragmatic skills like turn-taking and question-answer sequences.

My dissertation work was based on fieldwork conducted in Guatemala between 2013 and 2019. I worked with families and children who are deaf and living in the central highlands of Guatemala. Deaf people in the community where I work do not have access to an established sign language like American Sign Language (ASL) or Guatemalan Sign Language (LENSEGUA), but they create their own systems for communicating with family and friends.

I ask how these systems conventionalize, do signers start using similar signs over time? and what kinds of linguistic structure we see in these systems, do they resemble standard sign languages used in institutions and larger deaf communities? In particular, I am interested in the role of adult (parent or grandparent) language models versus peer (friend) language models and compare the sign systems of deaf children who have a deaf adult relative or interact with other same-aged deaf peers at school.