Research

My research focuses on the acquisition of Spanish as a heritage and second language and on the role of bilingual education in this process. In particular, I am interested in exploring how exposure, use, and education shape bilinguals' knowledge of Spanish. In this way, I explore how education, cumulative and current exposure, and the frequency of words and forms shape the highly systematic nature of heritage language acquisition from childhood to adulthood. I have a secondary interest in identifying differences between children acquiring English and Spanish with typical development and specific language impairment, and am also interested in the pedagogical and clinical implications of my findings.

Acquiring Spanish as a second and heritage language in dual-language immersion

In my first and primary area of research, I explore school-aged child heritage speakers and second language learners’ acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax, as work on this age range has been limited. In my dissertation research, I concentrated on the acquisition of two grammatical properties, subjunctive mood and differential object marking, and their acquisition across the late childhood years. My study is innovative in that it is among the only ones to compare children with different contexts of heritage language education (English-only versus dual language immersion), in addition to being among a small number of projects that evaluates morphosyntactic development in adolescents. My findings demonstrate that bilingual children ages 12-14 used both structures more than those ages 10-11; bilingual education influenced speakers’ command of differential object marking, but not subjunctive mood. Speakers who were more frequent users of Spanish were more likely to use both structures in production and on a receptive task. By using these tasks, this study exposes that children’s receptive knowledge often surpasses production. This is a novel contribution of this study, given most child acquisition research evaluates production only, which could underestimate children’s linguistic abilities.

Adult–child comparisons:

My second research area concentrates on the path of heritage language acquisition from childhood to adulthood. Research that compares heritage speakers of different age ranges is essential for better understanding the course of morphosyntactic development in Spanish as a heritage language. In a recent study that integrated the same children as in my dissertation, my data indicated that adolescent bilingual children ages 12-14 are similar to adult heritage speakers in their command of subjunctive mood, but that mastery of differential object marking continues into the young adult years. Using continuous variables, findings from this line of work reveal that higher proficiency in and frequency of use of Spanish accounted for faster growth. By analyzing individual differences, it is possible to observe that not a single participant never uses the subjunctive or the differential object marker, which shows that heritage speakers’ morphosyntactic knowledge is variable within a single speaker. This research has been published in the International Journal of Bilingualism and Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (open access).

Disentangling bilingualism and language disorder:

In my third research area, I carry out research on morphosyntactic development in bilingual children with developmental language disorder. Typically developing bilingual children often present similar morphosyntactic patterns to monolinguals with developmental language disorder, making it challenging to differentiate between the effects of crosslinguistic influence and those of language impairment. I am leading a collaborative project with colleagues from the Dual Lab at the University of Houston to explore the degree to which bilingualism (versus monolingualism), clinical status (typical development versus developmental language disorder), and patterns of exposure and dominance account for the acquisition of the Spanish morphological system. This approach draws upon the same one that I have adopted in my other research areas by incorporating the role of individual patterns of exposure into the study of developmental language disorder for the first time. Thus far, results have reaffirmed that monolingual norms are not adequate for diagnosing bilingual children with language disorder. In future work, I plan to continue to explore novel areas of the Spanish morphosyntactic system, as well as complex syntax, that may prove useful in expanding our knowledge of developmental language disorder.

Sources of variability in adult heritage and second language grammars

Another area of great interest to me in my research is modeling the sources of variability that emerge in heritage language grammars. Compared with traditional perspectives that discuss the simplicity of heritage languages, I aspire to shift the narrative towards their incredibly nuanced nature. In a paper in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, I evaluated how frequency of use, age of acquisition, and lexical frequency affect heritage speakers' knowledge of preterit aspect in Spanish. In a follow-up study published in Lingua, I show that L2 learners of Spanish with similar proficiency behave remarkably similarly to heritage speakers, and are also susceptible to the effects of lexical frequency in the production of preterit aspect with state verbs.

I also have a published paper in Heritage Language Journal that uses data from this project to highlight the interplay of factors that affect heritage language acquisition and maintenance. On one hand, I show that the multiple variables that purportedly can be used as proxies for activation of the heritage language (e.g., proficiency and frequency of use) are not always correlated. Furthermore, I showed that participants' lexical frequency ratings correlated with the distribution of lemmas in three Spanish language corpora. In turn, these findings support the fact that heritage speakers' morphosyntactic knowledge is highly sensitive to the frequency of lexical items, but that it is possible that the multiple methods that have been established as "proxies" for activation may not be consistent with one another. The goal of these projects is to continue to sharpen our tools for exploring sources of variability between and within heritage speakers in their knowledge of Spanish, while also addressing methodological questions on how to empiricalize language activation. These projects contribute to the recent movement that highlights the highly systematic nature of bilingual competence.

Bridging the gap: Educational impact

Although the experiments that I conduct are generally linguistic in nature, an essential part of my mission as a researcher is to make what I study approachable and impactful for teachers and researchers. It is critical to bridge the professions of teacher and researcher through scholarship that is dedicated to make linguistic studies understandable for non-linguists. In a recent publication in the National Association for Bilingual Education Journal, I worked with a team of colleagues to prepare a series of recommendations for teachers, administrators, and assessment developers concerning the importance of developing instruments for measuring bilingual development in immersion schools. In our article, we advocate for practices such as using frequent vocabulary, testing production and comprehension separately, and distinguishing between content area knowledge and linguistic knowledge in how tasks are designed. These practices, all based on research on language acquisition, have the potential to maximize our knowledge of how children develop their heritage language through immersive bilingual education, which will allow us to set the stage for testing appropriate pedagogical techniques and developing bilingual learning standards for multilingual students. Although this is the first article that I have prepared of this nature, my plan is to regularly publish for an audience of educational scholars. Bilingual education and language acquisition are two parallel fields that have a lot to learn from one another, so regular scholarship on how bilingual education shapes language acquisition, as well as on how language acquisition research can inform pedagogical practices, is essential.