In senior kindergarden,
I made the startling discovery that some people could speak and even think
in languages other than Spanish. I have since then been fascinated by the
study of how languages differ at the syntax/semantics interface, and by how
child and adult learners solve this part of the problem of language acquisition.
My dissertation on relatives and interrogative clauses in the acquisition
of Spanish and English led to explorations of referentiality in the acquisition
of nominal and clausal structure. I
have conducted experiments on bare nominal idioms in child English, on
null pronouns in L2 Spanish, on the role of tense in the acquisition of
factivity, and on the Spanish subjunctive in irrealis contexts. In
ongoing work I explore how learners acquire functional items (such as definite
articles, number or tense morphemes) that have comparable syntactic distribution
across certain languages but lead to different semantic interpretations.| Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, University of Toronto |
| Ph.D., Hispanic Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 1993 |
| Licenciatura en Lenguas Modernas, Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, 1983 |
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