Liliana Sánchez, PhD

My research interests are bilingual, heritage and comparative syntax. In bilingual syntax, my current work focuses on crosslinguistic influence across language components especially syntax, morphology and informational structure (Spanish in contact with Quechua, Shipibo, Ashaninka, Korean and English). My work on heritage bilingualism focuses on modeling processes of divergent access to heritage grammars. In comparative syntax, I work on the interface between informational structure and morphosyntax (Spanish, Quechua). I am also interested in language assessment in minority populations.

Marina Sokolova, PhD

Marina Sokolova is a Visiting Researcher at the BIlingualism and Language Contact Lab. She received her PhD at the University of Southampton, UK. Her research interests are non-native language processing and production, sentence parsing, syntax-prosody interface, cross-linguistic influence in second and third languages, and code-switching by sequential multilinguals.

Gabriel Martinez, PhD

Gabriel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Goethe Universitätin Frankfurt. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Connecticut. His research interests lie in morphology, syntax, and semantics, as well as bilingualism. Some of the topics he has worked on are evidentiality, recomplementation, locality of movement, verbs of change, and degree constructions. His research has focused on Romance and Andean languages, where his primary interest has been on Spanish and Aymara.

Megan Marshall, PhD student

Megan Marshal is a 3rd Phd Student. Her research interests center on the development of Spanish heritage bilinguals from varying perspectives, phonological, syntactic, and social as well as the intersection of instruction and pedagogy and heritage language speakers. She currently teaches Spanish for heritage speakers at UIC and DePaul University.

Citlaly Herrera, MA student

Citlaly is in her second year of the master’s program. Her research interests include language attrition, particularly in the case of bilingual returnees. Her interests also include the bilingual development of heritage speakers, with a focus on their phonology and use of code-switching. She is currently teaching Introduction to Spanish Linguistics and is also a member of the Multilingual Phonology Lab at UIC.

Mariela Rodriguez, MA student

Mariela is in her second year of the master’s program.  Her research interest includes first language attrition and the bi-directionality of second and third language acquisition, in terms of the effects on conflicting phonotactic systems. She is also interested in bilingual development and maintenance, in particular, that of Heritage Speakers. She is also a member of the Multilingual Phonology Lab and teaches in the Spanish Basic Language Program.