Contact Information
707 S. Mathews Ave. | MC-176
Urbana, IL 61801
Research Interests
Second Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, Bilingualism, Heritage Languages, Morphosyntax
Research Description
My research program examines the cognitive processes that support language comprehension, lexical learning, and morphosyntactic acquisition in bilinguals, and how these mechanisms generalize across bilingual populations and linguistic structures to advance our understanding of the acquisition and processing of second and heritage languages.
In my dissertation, I investigate how morphosyntactic cues are used during the reading and comprehension of complex structures in Spanish as a heritage language in the United States, with the premise that individual variation in age of onset of bilingualism and experience with heritage language literacy can influence processing and interpretation.
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 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.
External Links
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