Students
Our lab includes both undergraduate and graduate students working on various child language projects.
BriAnne Amador
Originally from San Antonio, Texas, BriAnne is currently pursuing her MA in Linguistics. Her research interests include signed language phonology and signed language acquisition. She is working with Jill P. Morford and Naomi Shin on the Minority Language Acquisition project, coding and analyzing ASL demonstratives use in deaf children.
Elisabeth Baker
Elisabeth Baker is pursuing a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics. Her primary research interests are in language acquisition and language variation and change. She is specifically interested in child language acquisition. Her research cosuses on children's acquisition of sociolinguistic variation and patterns of regularization. Her publication on children's use of non-standard preterit forms in Spanish children is forthcoming in the Journal of Child Language.
Huitzili González
Huitzili was raised in Albuquerque and is currently pursuing her B.A. in East Asian studies and Spanish. She is passionate about language acquisition and development as a means to preserve and celebrate all cultures and languages, including Nahuatl, the language that gave her the name “Huitzili”.
Luisa Hurtado Iglesias
Luisa received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Spanish with a minor in Portuguese from the University of New Mexico in 2020. She is currently pursuing a M.A. in Hispanic Linguistics. As a native Spanish speaker, she is interested in language acquisition, bilingualism, and sociolinguistics. She is currently working on a project related to children's acquisition of direct object clitics.
Lyle Jeff
Originally from Crownpoint, New Mexico, Lyle is pursuing a MA in Linguistics. His primary research interests include bilingualism, child language acquisition, and signed language linguistics. He also is passionate about linguistics pertaining to signed language interpreting. Lyle's MA thesis focuses on Deaf children's referent selection in a shared interactional space and will inform the lab's Minority Language Acquisition project.
Sarah Lease
Sarah is pursuing an MA in Hispanic Linguistics. She is particularly interested in the interface between phonology and morphosyntax and is examining Spanish-English bilingual children's vowels to better understand how these children express grammatical gender in Spanish.
Mariana Marchesi
Originally from Argentina, Mariana is currently pursuing a PhD in Linguistics. She has an MA in TESOL, and her research focuses on children's acquisition of minority languages. She is currently investigating child heritage speakers' production of demonstratives in Spanish and English.
Fredy Mendieta
Fredy is currently pursuing a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics. His research focuses on Spanish-speaking adults' and children's co-speech gestures, in particular points accompanying the production of demonstratives in the interactional space.
Bettie Petersen
Bettie is pursuing a PhD in Educational Linguistics. She has an M.Ed. In Deaf Education Early Intervention from Utah State University. She works as an early intervention provider for the New Mexico School for the Deaf where she supports communication in families with deaf/hard of hearing children. She is passionate about sign language acquisition for deaf/hard of hearing children who have hearing parents.
David Player
I originally hail from Shreveport, Louisiana, and I am currently pursuing an MA in Linguistics. My primary interest is in the sociolinguistics of signed language. I hope I will get an opportunity to research how Black signers use American Sign language differently in the post-civil rights movement era. I'm currently working with Jill Morford on coding and analyzing adults' use of demonstratives in ASL.
Ashley Toribio
Ashley is pursuing an MA in Speech and Hearing Sciences, and currently works at Bilingual Therapies, INC. Ashley hails from the Pueblo of Sandia, and previously worked at the Tiwa Language Program. She has worked on the Minority Language Acquisition Project with Jill Morford and Naomi Shin examining standardized tests used to assess pre-schoolers in New Mexico.
Paul Twitchell
Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Paul is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics at UNM. His research interests include Deaf education, signed language acquisition among second language learners, and ASL grammatical linguistic features, such as negation. He is working with Jill Morford and Naomi Shin on the Minority Language Acquisition project.
Tamera Yazzie
Tamera is currently pursuing an MA in Linguistics. Tamera hails from Gallup, New Mexico. She is currently working with Jill Morford and Naomi Shin on the Minority Language Acquisition project. She is part of the research team examining standardized tests used to assess pre-schoolers in New Mexico. Tamera also works for UNM’s Diné Language Program.
Department of Linguistics. MSC03-2130. 1 University of New Mexico. Albuquerque, NM 87131.
Physical Location: Humanities, Room 447 Phone: 505-277-6353 lobolanguage@unm.edu