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 bilinguals, particularly heritage speakers of Spanish, process Spanish morphosyntax in reading, focusing on structures such as gender agreement and passive voice sentences. Using eye-tracking and statistical modeling, my research examines how age of onset, schooling, and literacy shape morphosyntactic knowledge and real-time sentence processing.

Education

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

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

BA in TESOL, Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador, Venezuela. 2016.

 

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