My primary research interest is Quechua first language acquisition, especially the acquisition of morphosyntax and argument structure. I have carried out fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes of Arequipa and Ancash, and I continue collecting Quechua child language data in Cuzco, Peru. I am also interested in second language acquisition and bilingualism, and, since coming to UTEP, I have studied school-aged children’s ability to interpret figurative language in English and Spanish. In addition to these research pursuits, I have directed foreign language programs (English and Spanish) in the U.S. and in Peru, where I lived for twenty years. I have also given workshops and courses for language teachers in the U.S., Peru, and Ecuador.
Articles
Child production of Quechua evidential morphemes in conversations and story retellings, Journal of Child Language (2008)
Languages such as Turkish, Korean, and Japanese exhibit evidential morphemes encoding information source as direct...
Learning the meaning of verbs: insights from Quechua, First Language (2008)
Largely based on observations of English-speaking children, investigators have proposed constraints on verb learning, e.g.,...
Adult and child production of Quechua relative clauses, First Language (2006)
This study investigates the production of Quechua relative clauses by Peruvian adults and children, aged...
Child acquisition of Quechua causatives and change-of-state verbs, First Language (2002)
This paper uses data concerning the acquisition of Quechua causatives to explore the development of...
Learning to construct verbs in Navajo and Quechua (with Muriel Saville-Troike), Journal of Child Language (2002)
Navajo and Quechua, both languages with a highly complex morphology, provide intriguing insights into the...
Contributions to Books
School and Family [chapter 6] (with H. Douglas Adamson), Language minority students in American schools: An education in English (2005)
Duplication in the L2 Spanish produced by Quechua-speaking children: Transfer of a pragmatic strategy, Language in Contact (2000)
Languages long in contact in the Andean countries, Quechua and Spanish are intriguing partners in...