Profile picture for Danny Melendez

Contact Information

4024 Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics Building
707 S. Mathews Ave. | MC-176
Urbana, IL 61801

Office Hours

Fall 2025: Off teaching duties
PhD Candidate
Research Assistant
Teaching Assistant

Research Interests

Bilingualism, Psycholinguistics, Spanish as a Heritage Language, L2 Acquisition, Code-Switching.

Research Description

I investigate how bilingual Spanish–English speakers—both heritage speakers and L2 learners—read and interpret Spanish sentences in real time. More specifically, I examine how language experience and (bi)literacy influence the processing of morphosyntactic features such as gender, number, and verbal agreement, as well as the comprehension of complex structures like passive voice and relative clauses.

Education

PhD in Hispanic Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In Progress.

MA in Hispanic Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2022.

BA in the Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador, Venezuela. 2017.

 

Courses Taught

SPAN 101 Elementary Spanish I

SPAN 122 Intensive Elementary Spanish

SPAN 130 Intermediate Spanish

SPAN 142 Spanish in the Professions

SPAN 228 Spanish Composition - Section A For Heritage Speakers

SPAN 307 Bilingualism

SPAN 308 Spanish in the U.S.

Recent Publications

Melendez, D., Jegerski, J., & Montrul, S. A. (2025). The Role of Determiners in the Processing of Gender Agreement Morphology by Heritage Speakers of Spanish. Languages, 10(9), 202. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10090202