Research interests and agenda: 

My work addresses 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 and eye-tracking to examine linguistic processes across production and comprehension. Using these complementary methods, I investigate how children and adults learn and attend to the linguistic and social constraints that shape variable language use. By comparing children across different varieties of Spanish, I aim to disentangle patterns that reflect the language input of a particular community from those that reflect broader processes of language acquisition. 

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