My research interests include first and second language acquisition, especially in
bilingual populations. I spent 10 years as coordinator of the University of Miami
Bilingualism Study Group in Florida, and continue to work and publish in the field from
my new homebase in western Massachusetts. At UMass Amherst since 1998, I worked on
African American English child speech, as Project Manager for the NIH supported DELV
project, under Harry Seymour, P.I. The culmination of that project, the Diagnostic
Evaluation of Language Variation tests were published by Harcourt Assessments, Inc. in
2003 and 2005. 

I also work part-time in the research area, the Office of Research Development (ORD)
where I focus on projects to broaden the impact of science (Broader Impacts) and increase
the representation of women and people of color in science and engineering.

Bilingualism

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Profile Effects in Early Bilingual Language and Literacy (with D. Kimbrough Oller and Alan Cobo-Lewis), Applied Psycholinguistics (2007)

Bilingual children's language and literacy is stronger in some domains than others. Reanalysis of data...

 

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Cross-language synonyms in the lexicons of bilingual infants: One language or two? (with Sylvia C. Fernandez and D.Kimbrough Oller), Journal of Child Language (1995)

This study tests the widely-cited claim from Volterra & Taeschner (1978), which is reinforced by...

 

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Patterns of interaction in the lexical development in two languages of bilingual infants (with Sylvia C. Fernandez), Language Learning (1994)

We investigated the extent to which bilingual children follow the same patterns and timetable of...

 

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Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: Comparison to monolingual norms (with Sylvia C. Fernandez and D.Kimbrough Oller), Language Learning (1993)

This study compares lexical development in a sample of 25 simultaneous bilingual and 35 monolingual...

 

African-American English

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Dialect-neutral indices of narrative cohesion and evaluation (with Frances Burns, Peter A. de Villiers, and Tempii Champion), Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools (2012)

Purpose: This study compares the development of essential elements of narrative skill in children from...

 

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Phonological Milestones for African American English-Speaking Children Learning Mainstream American English as a Second Dialect (with Shelley Velleman, Tiffany Charko, and Timothy J. Bryant), Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools (2009)

Purpose: This study provides milestones for phonological development in African American English (AAE) speakers learning...

 

General Linguistics

The comprehension of metaphor by preschool children: Implications for a theory of lexicon, Dissertations from ProQuest (1988)

Comprehension of metaphor in preschoolers was studied through an elicited repetition task. Subjects were 52...