People

Marina Sartor is a graduate student in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at Penn State University. She graduated in Intercultural and Interlinguistic Mediation from Università degli Studi dell’Insubria in Como, Italy. During her undergraduate studies, she taught Italian language and culture at a school for Chinese immigrants, an experience that sparked her interest in second language acquisition from both a teaching and research perspective. At Penn State, her research focuses on Hispanic Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Psycholinguistics with a focus on grammatical gender and learning mechanism. Current research includes eye-tracking experiments on prediction in Italian and the learning of Spanish as second language. She plans to further expand her research using event-related potentials/ERP to explore how English speakers acquire Spanish as a second language. 

Kevin Andia is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Linguistics and Language Science at Penn State University. He works with Mapuche bilingual communities in Chile, exploring how diverse linguistic experiences shape language processing strategies. His research contributes to a more accurate and empirically grounded understanding of Indigenous bilingualism. As a member of the Cognition of Adult Language Acquisition (CoALA) Lab, Kevin has contributed to projects investigating the time course of new word learning and lexical retrieval during reading, gaining experience with advanced methodologies such as the co-registration of eye-tracking and EEG.

Luciano Ragonese 

Luciano is a fourth-year Schreyer scholar studying Applied Statistics, Mathematics, Linguistics, and Spanish. He joined the lab in the spring of 2025, working on projects that explore the intersection of statistical patterns and language learning. For his honors thesis, he is investigating the role of input variability in English speakers’ learning of the Spanish subjunctive mood.

Kasandra Cessna

Kasandra majored in Communication Sciences and Disorders and completed her honors thesis in the spring of 2025, titled "Investigating the Relationship Between Working Memory and Second Language Input Variability for Adult Learners Post-Concussion". She is currently pursuing an M.A. in Speech Language Pathology at Towson University.

Caden Vitti

Caden completed a double major in Spanish and Energy Engineering, in line with his interests in environmental justice and the intersection of technology and culture. As part of the PIRE program, he spent a summer conducting this study in Puerto Rico. Caden explored how code-switching by Spanish-English bilingual Puerto Ricans impacts the grammatical interpretation of they/them pronouns in the English language.