Embedded Files
In progress! More coming soon!
Bridging Language Gaps in Digital Health Access
Clin Lai, Romi Román, Sarah Tran
This project investigates how digital technologies influence access to credible health information among multilingual, non-native English speakers—specifically Spanish and Mandarin-speaking communities in the Northeast U.S. Prior research shows these groups are more vulnerable to health misinformation (Anaya et al., 2021; Jin et al., 2024; Shin et al., 2023), in part due to language and literacy barriers in systems designed primarily for native English speakers. Combining methods from sociolinguistics, media studies, and human-computer interaction, we aim to identify actionable strategies to reduce inequities in digital information access. We use the MAIN Model (Sundar, 2008) and the Internet Skills framework (van Dijk & van Deursen, 2014), to examine how social, linguistic and comprehension barriers intersect with digital skills, shaping users’ ability to find and assess quality information.
Transdisciplinary problems require transdisciplinary approaches and research teams!
Transdisciplinary approach: integration of knowledge and methods from different disciplines, as well as engaging with stakeholders and incorporating societal perspectives. Researchers, experts from different fields, and non-academic participants (like community members, organizations, or policymakers) work together across traditional boundaries to solve complex real-world problems
Distinguishing Development from Variation: Cross-Linguistic Insights into Subject Pronoun Expression in Dominican Spanish Speaking Children
This project examines how children acquire variable linguistic patterns and how these patterns interact with broader processes of language development. Focusing on Subject Pronoun Expression in Dominican Spanish, I explore how factors such as discourse context, morphology, and phonological variation shape children’s early use of pronouns. Through cross-dialectal and cross-linguistic comparisons, this project seeks to disentangle which aspects of variable language use stem from universal developmental mechanisms, and which emerge from the specific input children receive. I combine corpus analyses, elicited production tasks, and eye-tracking experiments to investigate how children and adults interpret and produce variable subject pronouns in real time. More broadly, this work contributes to understanding how social and structural variation inform the trajectory of grammatical development in bilingual and monolingual speakers alike.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse