Biography:
I am currently a graduate student in PSU's department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. I received B.A.s from North Carolina State University in Spanish Language and Literature and International Relations, and remained there for my M.A.s in English Linguistics and Spanish Linguistics. My principal interests are sociolinguistics, language contact and bilingualism. These subfields have been the topic of my research and fieldwork in Paraguay and Argentina, and I am currently working with Dr. Torres Cacoullos (SIP) on the speech of bilinguals in a long-standing community in Northern New Mexico.
Project Summary:
My PIRE grant will take me to the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, NM, where I will complete an eye-tracking experiment testing the processing of a code-switched construction which has been may have been grammaticalized within the unilingual Spanish of the community. By examining the processing of these sentences by bilinguals in the area, the grammaticalization within the community can be tested, and a contribution can be made to the understanding of dialectal variation found in code-switching communities based on understandings of their unilingual language behaviors