My dissertation, The effects of event typicality and syntactic constraints on the use of copula verbs by heritage speakers of Spanish, explores how pragmatic and syntactic factors influence the selection of the Spanish copulas ser and estar by child and adult heritage speakers. In particular, I examine how event typicality and syntactic complexity shape speakers’ production and interpretation of these copulas in event-location contexts. By investigating the interaction between these factors across different age groups and language experiences, my dissertation aims to provide a better understanding of how heritage speakers develop and use grammatical knowledge and, more broadly, to contribute to theories of bilingual language acquisition and development. 

My research examines the acquisition and use of Spanish by heritage speakers and bilingual populations, with particular attention to how individual differences in language experience shape grammatical knowledge and language use. I am especially interested in factors such as age of acquisition, length and amount of exposure, patterns of language use, and proficiency, and how these variables interact with linguistic factors across different grammatical domains. By combining experimental methods with quantitative analyses, my work seeks to better understand patterns of variation within bilingual populations and how linguistic experience contributes to the development and use of grammatical knowledge. Ultimately, this research aims to contribute to broader theories of bilingualism, heritage language acquisition, and language development.

My future research will expand in two complementary directions. First, I am interested in integrating computational approaches, including natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLMs), and transformer-based models such as BERT, into the analysis of linguistic data. The growing availability of narrative data from heritage speakers of different ages and L2 learners of Spanish provides an opportunity to examine patterns of language use at a scale that complements traditional experimental and quantitative methods. Second, I plan to extend my research to linguistic variation across varieties of Spanish, with particular interest in Andean and Nariño Spanish. The historical contact between Spanish and Indigenous languages such as Quechua makes this region especially relevant for investigating language variation, contact, and change. Together, these directions will allow me to combine experimental, quantitative, and computational approaches to better understand how linguistic systems vary across speakers, communities, and contexts.