Research interests and research agenda: 

My work addressed the gap between two literatures: theories of language variation and theories of language acquisition. I explore this through fieldwork with children and their caregivers in the Dominican Republic.

I combine naturalistic speech, behavioral tasks, cognitive tasks, and eye-tracking to triangulate across production and comprehension and to understand how children and adults attend to the constraints that shape variation. By comparing children's behavior across different dialects of Spanish, I can separate what belongs to a community's input from what belongs to the developing mind more generally. 

Beyond this core line of research, I also draw on transdisciplinary approaches to explore the interplay of media design, digital and AI literacy, and language proficiency. My work aims to contribute to current theories of language acquisition and to the development of human-centered technologies.