I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. My research interests center around the acquisition of structures laying in the syntax-semantics interface in second language and heritage speakers of Spanish with different dominant languages (e.g., English, Portuguese, Romanian). I am especially interested in the maintenance of Spanish as a heritage language and in the attrition of L1 Spanish. Born in Seville, Spain into a Spanish-Brazilian family, I have always been intrigued by bilingualism and heritage/familial languages.
My dissertation, “The Acquisition of the Syntactic and Morphological Properties of Spanish Imperatives in Heritage and Second Language Speakers”, investigates the acquisition of Spanish imperatives (i.e., commands), an area of grammar strongly linked to the speaker-addressee interaction that has not been studied before in heritage or L2 speakers of Spanish. My dissertation researches differences in terms of age of acquisition, levels of proficiency in Spanish, and lexical frequency (i.e., how frequently a given lexical item appears in the input). The results of my dissertation indicate that age of acquisition and Spanish proficiency determine the bilinguals’ knowledge of Spanish imperatives. Indeed, L2 speakers only achieve knowledge of Spanish imperatives when their overall proficiency is high whereas heritage speakers attained command of some aspects of Spanish imperatives in lower proficiency levels. Lexical frequency, in turn, accounts for the variability only in heritage speakers. These results can be interpreted in terms of language activation: at all levels of proficiency, heritage speakers’ responses are more accurate if they are tested on words that they are frequently exposed to, a factor not relevant among L2 learners. These findings indicate the need to reinforce the teaching of imperatives in the curricula: although imperatives occur very frequently in the input and the textbooks of heritage and L2 learners, they represent a challenge for these populations.