I am interested in language development. I grew up in Puerto Rico and have lived in different parts of the US and the Caribbean at different points in my life. This experience has allowed me to become a balanced bilingual. Yet, I know that balanced bilingualism is not easy to achieve. I would like to learn how people become proficient speakers of more than one language.
When learning to speak a language with native fluency, one needs to know more than vocabulary and grammar. Much of what we understand and convey through language requires pragmatic competence. I study the development of pragmatic competence in monolingual and bilingual individuals to determine how we learn to apply the norms of the languages we speak. Pragmatic competence may also provide information about one's background. I am interested in how information about someone's background that is conveyed through speech affects their interactions with others.
Another area of multilingual language development concerns the vocabulary development of each individual language. When learning new words, bilinguals need to assess the knowledge state of the label provider with regard to their language expertise. That is, I would like to learn English words from English speakers, but Spanish words from Spanish speakers. In this regard, vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children may differ from that of monolingual children. Additionally, children growing up in bilingual environments where everyone speaks each language with different degrees of fluency, may need to take this into account when deciding whom to trust.
My research focuses on these questions in monolingual and multilingual children and adults. I am currently a 5th year PhD student at Vanderbilt University studying developmental psychology and working at the Language Development Lab with Dr. Megan Saylor. At the moment, I am writing up my dissertation in order to defend it in June.
