About me

I am originally from Slovakia, with Hungarian heritage, and I have lived and worked in the Czech Republic, Spain, Mexico, and the United States. I spent about ten years in Mexico, where I did my graduate studies and fieldwork with Indigenous communities. Moving between these languages and places is a big part of why I study variation and bilingualism. I am also a food enthusiast, with a side interest in the science of Mexican food.

I am an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at Penn State. Before that, I was a postdoctoral scholar and lab manager in the BrainTracking Lab at Penn State (2023–2026) and a postdoctoral fellow at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). I hold a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Autonomous University of Querétaro.

Research interests

I am a linguist who studies variation and change in Spanish across monolingual and bilingual speakers, with the tools of psycholinguistics. I work with Spanish speakers in Mexico and Spain, Spanish–English bilinguals in the United States, and Indigenous bilinguals in Mexico. My main question is what it takes for a new form to become part of how people speak and understand their language. I study how social factors, such as attitudes, beliefs, and identity, and cognitive factors, such as exposure, processing, and language experience, shape the answer.

I am also interested in phonetics and phonology, word learning and lexical processing, morphosyntactic processing and prediction, and how heritage speakers and other bilinguals differ from monolinguals and L2 learners. My methods include fieldwork and interviews, corpus analysis, acoustic analysis, eye-tracking, pupillometry, EEG, and statistical modeling in R.

Current projects

Gender-neutral Spanish. Many Spanish speakers now use ‑e (amigues ‘friends’) and, in writing, ‑x and ‑@ to include non-binary people or to avoid the masculine generic. I lead a multi-site project in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. It combines elicited production, self-paced reading, measures of attitudes, and recorded conversations in which participants talk about these forms. I have also begun building a corpus of online texts from Mexico to trace when, where, and in which words these forms spread.

Gender, pronouns, and agreement. I study how bilinguals interpret singular they in English. I also study how listeners and a speech-recognition system respond to naturally occurring variation in grammatical gender agreement.

Language shift and heritage speakers. In many Indigenous communities in Mexico, Spanish is gradually replacing the community language. Through years of fieldwork with Hñäñho (Otomi)–Spanish bilinguals in Querétaro, I described the Hñäñho vowel system and applied the heritage-speaker concept to Indigenous communities. I have also studied how language shift shapes speech perception and children’s vocabulary across generations. You can read more on the Hñäñho page.

Language and the brain

Event-related potentials (ERPs) provide a continuous measure of brain activity in real time and offer valuable insights into the cognitive mechanisms associated with language processing. ERPs are small portions of an electroencephalogram (EEG) recorded via a series of electrodes that register voltage changes on the participant's scalp, time-locked to linguistic stimuli that are presented visually or aurally.