I am an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. My main line of research deals with intonational development - how do children acquire intonational forms and their meanings? What other cues (such as facial gestures) are important in this development process? My dissertation work specifically focused on the pragmatics of yes-no question intonation and the development of yes-no question intonation in Puerto Rican Spanish. My work appeared in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día in an article by fellow linguist Maia Sherwood. You can read the article here.
Current Projects
My current work deals with how epistemic meaning is encoded intonationally - I am most interested in how this is done in the diverse speech communities of Western New England.
One of the methodologies applied in my research is eyetracking, and I am currently using this methodology in a collaboration with Pilar Prieto (I-CREA/Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Llorenç Andreu i Barrachina (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) and Núria Esteve Gibert (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) on a project exploring how children integrate intonational and lexical cues with situational information and world knowledge.
I am a member of the Grup d'Estudis de Prosòdia, directed by Pilar Prieto. This group aims to understand the role of prosody and gestures in human communication, comprehension and language processing and is based at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
MA and PhD Students
I am interested in supervising MA and PhD projects dealing with intonational phonology (especially Caribbean Spanish) as well as intonational development. Students with an interest in intonational development and clinical populations (namely children with high-functioning autism) are especially welcome.
Current Projects
My current work deals with how epistemic meaning is encoded intonationally - I am most interested in how this is done in the diverse speech communities of Western New England.
One of the methodologies applied in my research is eyetracking, and I am currently using this methodology in a collaboration with Pilar Prieto (I-CREA/Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Llorenç Andreu i Barrachina (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) and Núria Esteve Gibert (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) on a project exploring how children integrate intonational and lexical cues with situational information and world knowledge.
I am a member of the Grup d'Estudis de Prosòdia, directed by Pilar Prieto. This group aims to understand the role of prosody and gestures in human communication, comprehension and language processing and is based at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
MA and PhD Students
I am interested in supervising MA and PhD projects dealing with intonational phonology (especially Caribbean Spanish) as well as intonational development. Students with an interest in intonational development and clinical populations (namely children with high-functioning autism) are especially welcome.
