People
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Dr. Jennifer Cabrelli, Lab Director
Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics,
PhD University of Florida
Jennifer’s research interests include acquisition and attrition of phonology and phonetics, third language acquisition, phonological theory, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese phonology and morphosyntax, and acquisition of syntax.
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Carrie Pichan
Lab Manager and PhD Student
Carrie’s research interests include adult second (L2) and third (L3) language phonological acquisition, methodologies in L3 production and perception research, corpus phonology, and acoustic properties of Ln and heritage speech. Her projects to date have explored the role of initial phonological transfer in L3 Italian and Brazilian Portuguese by Spanish-English bilinguals as well as cross-generational unstressed vowel reduction in heritage Spanish populations. Her dissertation project aims to compile a multilingual speech corpus using a wealth of L1, L2, L3, and heritage production data collected at UIC since 2015.
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Megan Marshall
PhD Student in Hispanic Linguistics
Megan’s research focus is on child bilingual language development, dual language instruction, heritage language maintenance and critical language pedagogy. She currently teaches in the Heritage Language Program at UIC. Previous to her time at UIC she spent 9 years running a small business, Lango Chicago, that provided immersion language programs and curriculum for young children.
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John Escalante Martínez
PhD Student in Hispanic Linguistics
John’s research interests include heritage language grammars and phonology, methodologies in heritage speakers’ production, perception, and processing research, and prosody and the phonological-pragmatic interface in heritage languages. His current research explores the roles of dominance, proficiency, auditory processing, and phonological short-term memory on the production and perception of lexical stress by heritage speakers of Spanish. Prior to coming to UIC, John completed a BA in Hispanic linguistics at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.
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Jess Ward
PhD Student in Hispanic Linguistics
Jess’s research interests include phonological and syntactic L2 and L3 acquisition. Her current work is concerned with heritage speaker L3 acquisition, pronoun disambiguation, and L2 acquisition of word-final voiced stops.
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Jason Cruz
MA Student in Hispanic Linguistics
Jason’s research interests include anything and everything attrition related especially with trilinguals and L3 acquisition.
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Isabella Silva DePue
MA Student in Hispanic Linguistics
Isabella’s research interests include heritage language acquisition and maintenance, and L2/L3 phonological acquisition. Her projects have explored the development of morphosyntax and lexical pragmatics in Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish as well as ironic speech and their prosodic correlates in Chilean Spanish.
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Colton Seaman
MA Student in Hispanic Linguistics
Colton’s research interests include L2 phonology and phonetics, code-switching and languages in contact.
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Ricardo Brum
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Ricardo’s research interests include second and third (L2/L3) language acquisition, attrition, speech production, repair mechanisms, and logographic languages. He has worked with data analysis of epenthetic vowels by L1 Brazilian Portuguese speakers.
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Anxhela Talelli
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Anxhela’s research interests include second (L2) and third (L3) language acquisition, attrition, and code-switching. She is currently working on her honors capstone project, which explores L2 attrition in bilingual returnees.
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Raegan Duym
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Raegan’s research interests include language shift and colloquialism in Italian American and Hispanic/Latino American communities, language attrition, and phonological acquisition.
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Enrique Ortiz
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Enrique’s research interests include heritage language acquisition and maintenance, and L3 acquisition. He is currently working under graduate student Jess Ward on heritage speaker L3 acquisition research.
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Michelle Soriano González
Undergraduate Research Assistant
Michelle is currently an undergraduate student working on her Sociology major and Spanish minor. Her previous research includes immigration as public policy, and she is now working alongside the Multilingual Phonology Lab team to explore language acquisition among Spanish heritage speakers.
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Sara Stefanich, PhD
Sara’s research interests include bi/multilingualism, code-switching, phonological theory, and the syntax-phonology interface. Her current projects investigate the acquisition of the Spanish palatal nasal by L1 English/L2 Spanish bilinguals and the phonological realization of code-switched structures at the word level by early Spanish/English bilinguals. Her dissertation examines the morphological and phonological restrictions on word-internal code-switching focusing specifically on whether words that have morphological mixing can also have phonological mixing (i.e., demonstrate evidence of two different phonologies).
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Graduate students: Leire Echevarría Canal (Assistant Professor, Maryville College), Brian Rocca (PhD Student, Indiana University), Citlaly Herrera (Visiting Lecturer in Spanish, UIC)
Undergraduate students: Mariela Rodriguez (Visiting Lecturer in Spanish, UIC), Stephanie Burton, Santhosh Ebenezer, Seth Mendez, Aletia Rebollar