My primary interests are in second language acquisition, bilingualism, indigenous languages of Latin America and applied linguistics. I am very interested in bilinguals and minority languages. I have been working in Latin America studying bilingual acquisition and exploring ways to support educational and revitalization projects with indigenous languages. On a more theoretical side, I am interested in symbolic representations of interlanguage and bilingual grammars, especially at the morphosyntactic level.

Current Research Projects

Bilingual acquisition in indigenous contexts

Wapichana bilingual acquisition and language description: Wapichana is an Arawak language spoken in the state of Roraima (Brazil) and in Guyana. The goal of this project is to study bilingual acquisition by individuals who speak Wapichana, Portuguese and English. My primary research partner (and previous MA advisee) in this project is Wendy Leandro (Lecturer at the University of Guyana). Our first publications cover the acquisition of recursive relative clauses headed by the relativizer "- uraz", and of recursive genitive constructions. I have also published a paper on the negation system in Wapichana. Wendy and I are now working on the description of the verb morphology in the language and are running experiments to study how bilingual children are acquiring it. This project was initially funded by a Healy grant in 2013.

The acquisition of positional verbs in Zapotec: This topic is the PhD dissertation of Ana Alonso, who is currently finishing her doctoral studies under my supervision. Zapotec is an Otomanguean language spoken in Mexico. Ana's project describes the positional verb system in Yalalag Zapotec, and looks into its acquisition by bilingual children in her community.

Indigenous language maintenance and revitalization

I worked for many years as a consultant and project coordinator providing support to the preparation of pedagogical materials for literacy and second language programs in indigenous languages in Brazil and Mexico. These collaborations with language teachers, community leaders and language activists helped me develop a greater understanding of the challenges faced by revitalization practices and language programs in those contexts. More recently, my work in this area evolved into the study and implementation of specific language maintenance and revitalization initiatives.

Pedagogical materials for language revitalization: In collaboration with the Wapichana teachers (Benedita A. da Silva, Thomas Isaac, Nilzimara de Sousa Silva, Odamir de Oliveira, Kimi Oliveira and Wanja Sebastião), Wendy Leandro and I have been researching ways to adapt and incorporate pedagogical practices from well-established language teaching approaches into L1 and L2 materials that could address the instructional needs of Wapichana learners. After finishing the Pedagogical Grammar, as part of the documentation project of Museu do Índio, we are now beginning a new project to prepare second language materials.

Reclaiming physical and communicative spaces: The goal of the project is to use second language instruction techniques for language revitalization purposes in situations where there was an interruption in intergeneration language transmission. The scenarios we are testing this technique involves formal or semi formal instructional contexts with teachers who can speak the language and learners who cannot. The approach proposes the development of specific materials for communicative situations where certain vocabulary and language forms are to be used. We use a series of activities to expose learners to the target language in controlled environments, and then physically move the activities to the space in the community where the communicative situation should take place. There will be two pilots running in 2020. One by the Wapichana group, and a second one in collaboration with a group of researchers working with Guató (a language where there are only two speakers left). I am writing a first paper explaining the methodology used, and the groups should have the first results from the pilots to report by 2021.

Literacy in Chatino: This is the PhD project of Isaura de los Santos, who is currently pursuing her doctoral degree under my supervision. Isaura and I worked on a series of initial experiments to study reading fluency in Chatino by speakers who could write in the language. Those tests showed several problems with the way readers were decoding the writing system, leading to severe issues in fluency and comprehension. We are now running a second batch of tests to identify specific issues with the orthography used to represent certain morphophonological phenomena in the language. The ultimate goal is to propose a more user friendly system and a series of specific activities that could improve reading fluency in the language.

Second language acquisition and heritage languages

L2 representation and multiple grammars: After Amaral and Roeper (2014a, 2014b) presented a first multiple grammars approach for L2 representation, I am now working on a descriptive model based on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar to explain how different linguistic features can coexist in bilingual grammars affecting what was originally called the "productivity of grammar rules" and exploring issues in optionality. I am currently working on two papers. The first with Andie Faber, where we argue that optionality can be the result of feature underspecification in the case of nominal agreement of Spanish L1 with Portuguese and English as L1. And a second one with Cândido Oliveira, in which we look at the acceptability of resultative constructions in English as an L2 (Portuguese L1) and we argue that a specific notion of productivity based on the number of lexical items that can be used by a given grammatical rule allow us to explain why L2 speakers accept constructions that are blocked by native speakers.

Portuguese as a heritage language in New England: This project is the focus of two dissertations by my PhD students: Alexandre Alves Santos and Marco Tulio Bittencourt. The goal is to look into morphological and syntactic properties of the language spoken by Portuguese heritage speakers from Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. It connects with an ongoing collaboration among different faculty and students at UMass Amherst and UMass Dartmouth. To learn more about it, please check the website of the Heritage Language Research Group at the University of Massachusetts.

Intelligent computer-assisted language learning

TAGARELA is an intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) system that can be viewed as an intelligent electronic workbook that provides students with opportunities to practice their reading, listening, and writing skills. Because it is a web-based system, it can be used anywhere there is a computer with internet access. TAGARELA uses Natural Language Processing technology to analyze students' input, and detect spelling, morphological, syntactic and semantic errors. This project was developed in collaboration with Detmar Meurers and Ramon Ziai (University of Tubingen).

LangBot was a project proposed and designed by Scott Payne, a colleague from Amherst College. LangBot is an instant-messenger (IM) computer program that enables students to have queries about various foreign languages answered in real-time, online. The tool that operates as a human IM "buddy" searches various language web sites and a specially developed corpus of language to respond to student queries. The project was funded by the US Department of Education.