Members

Liliana Sanchez
Director of the Bilingualism Research Laboratory
Professor of Hispanic linguistics

Dr. Sanchez’s interests are bilingual, heritage and comparative syntax. In bilingual syntax, her current work focuses on cross-linguistic influence across language components especially syntax, morphology and informational structure (Spanish in contact with Quechua, Shipibo, Ashaninka, and English). Her work on heritage bilingualism focuses on modeling processes of divergent access to heritage grammars. In comparative syntax, she works on the interface between informational structure and morphosyntax (Spanish, Quechua). She is currently Co-PI with Dr. Elena Koulidobrova in an NSF-funded project on how information on COVID-19 has reached minoritized populations.

Dr. Sanchez on Researchgate
Email: lesanche@uic.edu

Gabriel Martinez Vera
Associate Director of the Bilingualism Research Laboratory

Dr. Martinez is a Lecturer in Pragmatics at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. His research interests lie in morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as their interfaces (including the syntax-prosody interface) and bilingualism. His research has focused on Romance and Andean languages, as well as on American Sign Language.

Dr. Martinez’s website
Dr. Matinez on Researchgate
Email: gabriel.martinez-vera@newcastle.ac.uk

Megan Marshall
PhD Student

Megan Marshall is a doctoral student in the department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at UIC. Her 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.

Email: mmarsh26@uic.edu

Adam Cleveland
PhD Student

Adam’s research interests include syntax, bilingualism, and code switching. Adam is also interested in exploring language shift patterns among second and third generation Spanish speakers and how that relates to syntax. Previous research has focused on the syntax of clitics in Spanish. Adam completed a B.A. in Spanish with a minor in Linguistics at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) and completed his M.A. in Linguistics also at NEIU.

E-mail: acleve5@uic.edu

Jefferson Imbaquingo
PhD Student

PhD student in Hispanic Linguistics. His main current research focuses on the linguistic conjecture marking in Ecuadorian Andean Spanish monolinguals and Kichwa-Spanish bilinguals in Ecuador, as well as conjecture in the US context with Spanish L2 and Spanish heritage speakers. He is also currently working on the resolution of anaphoric structures by Spanish heritage speakers in the US and the role of prosody. He has taught L2 Spanish and Heritage Spanish courses. His general research interests are bilingual grammars, heritage speakers, language contact, Spanish in contact with indigenous languages, L1 dialects phonological inventories and L2 acquisition.

Email: jimbaq2@uic.edu

Rosela Romero
PhD Student

Rosela’s current research interest focuses on linguistic policy and language rights of Indigenous language speakers in language contact contexts. She is also interested in language and identity, bilingualism and language contact. She completed a MA in Hispanic Linguistics at UIC and a BA in Linguistic Anthropology at the Universidad Veracruzana (Veracruz, Mexico).

Email: rromer23@uic.edu

Jess Ward
PhD Student

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.

Email: jward41@uic.edu
Jess’s ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jess-Ward-7

Jess Ward on ResearchGate

Eduardo Daniel Pérez
PhD student

Daniel’s current interests are the study of information structure in the marking of evidentiality by bilinguals Kichwa – Spanish. His general interest is the study of Spanish in contact with indigenous languages. His prior research and collaborations have focussed on linguistic landscape, ethnography, and multimodal studies. He is a collaborator of the project Indigenous Health, Minoritized Communities, and COVID-19. He is also a member of the Interdisciplinary Research Program Oralidad Modernidad, Ecuador.

Email: eperez92@uic.edu

María Páramo Bárcena
MA student

María’s interests lay between pedagogy and research. She studied a MA in Didactics of Spanish as a L2 at Universidad Nebrija (Spain). While in Spain, she spent 3 years teaching Spanish to  migrants. When she visited the US to complete a MA in Hispanic Studies at Auburn University, she developed an interest in the field of bilingual morphosyntax. Her more general research interests are language contact, bilingual grammars & the role of universals in Ln phonology.

Email: mparam4@uic.edu

Isabella Silva DePue
MA Student

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.

Email: idepue2@uic.edu

Sam Wadas
MA student

Sam’s research interests include second and third language acquisition, phonological acquisition, and bilingualism. She would like to look more into tonal languages.

Email: swada3@uic.edu

Marina Sokolova
Visiting Researcher

Marina holds a PhD in Non-Native Language Processing from the University of Southampton, UK (2020), as well as a PhD in English Literature from Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (2011). Marina studied a MA in Second Language Studies at the Indiana University, USA (2017) and another MA in Linguistics and Intercultural Communication at Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (2002). Marina’s research interests focus in psycholinguistics: language processing, parsing algorithms in native and non-native languages, bilingualism and multilingualism, second and third language acquisition.

Email: horseshoebox@gmail.com

Julio César López Otero
Visiting Researcher

Dr. López is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. His research interests center around the acquisition of structures laying in the syntax-semantics interface in second language and heritage speakers of Spanish with different dominant languages (e.g., English, Portuguese, Romanian). He is especially interested in the maintenance of Spanish as a heritage language and in the attrition of L1 Spanish.

Dr. López on Researchgate
Dr. López’s Website
Email: jlopezotero@uh.edu

Shane Ebert
Post-doctoral Scholar

His research centers on understanding cross-linguistic properties of morphosyntax by taking advantage of the distinctive properties of linguistic systems with two or more languages, i.e. those of bilingual speakers. He mostly focuses on early and simultaneous bilinguals, although he also looks at late bilinguals, i.e. second language (L2) learners. His research interests include the morphosyntax of wh-questions, contrasts in acquisition by L2 learners and heritage speakers, formal approaches to heritage language, and methodology in experimental code-switching research.

Dr. Ebert on Academia
Email: sebert2@uic.edu