Our Team

Our team is made up of an interdisciplinary group of faculty at the University of Toronto, our collaborators in the US, research associates and graduate and undergraduate student assistants.

This collaboration brings together expertise in the areas of phonetics, morphosyntax, child language acquisition, bilingualism and statistics.

Prof. Laura Colantoni

Principal Investigator

Prof. Laura Colantoni is Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. Prof. Colantoni’s research explores the interplay between variability and categorization in the phonetics and phonology domain. She has worked on sound change and on bilingual populations including second language learners.
Her work has concentrated on Romance languages, Spanish and French in particular, but more recently, she has investigated the acquisition of English segmental and prosodic phonology by speakers from a variety of languages.

Prof. Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux

Co-Principal Investigator

Prof. Ana T. Pérez-Leroux is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the University of Toronto, with appointments in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of Linguistics. Prof. Pérez Leroux’s work on child language acquisition examines the development of sentence complexity and the acquisition of functional elements and related meaning contrasts. Her work focuses on the developmental interactions across different cognitive and language domains; and on the study of language development in bilingual children and the design of relevant language assessment strategies.

Prof. Danielle Thomas

Research Officer

Danielle Thomas (PhD, 2012) is the Project Manager of Bilinguals in Toronto, with a research background in child and adult bilingualism. She has over 10 years of professional experience as a teacher, administrator and outreach director for projects in the areas of language, bilingualism, and the provision of social services in Canada, the US, and Ghana.

Collaborators

Prof. Susana Bejar

Prof. Susana Bejar is Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. Prof. Bejar specializes in the morphology and syntax of phi-features (person, number, gender), in particular agreement systems and restrictions. Her work examines how the structure of featural systems determines how forms of agreement are expressed, with agreement failure playing an especially significant role in the derivation of complex morphological agreement patterns.

Prof. Alejandro Cuza

Prof. Alejandro Cuza is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the School of Language and Cultures at Purdue University. Prof. Cuza’s research focuses on the acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax and semantics among second language learners, heritage speakers and young bilingual children. He has worked on child bi-literacy development, and language contact and change in Spanish in the U.S.

Prof. Elizabeth Johnson

Prof. Elizabeth Johnson is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto/Mississauga. Prof. Johnson is a developmental psychologist with deep ties to the field of linguistics, and a Tier II CRC in Spoken Language Acquisition. Her research encompasses early language development, including infant word recognition, acquisition of connected speech processes, how perception of variability (accents and dialects) impacts early development and on the developmental links between early perception and production.

Prof. Natalia Mazzaro

Prof. Natalia Mazzaro is Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at University of Texas/El Paso. Prof. Mazzaro’s research is in sociolinguistic variation across monolingual and bilingual varieties of Spanish, and in languages in contact with Spanish. Her work focuses on both phonetics and morpho-syntax and the interaction between them, and includes issues like phonetic accommodation.

Prof. Jessamyn Scherz

Prof. Jessamyn Scherz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. Prof. Scherz is a phonetician whose work aims to gain a better understanding of how we perceive and produce speech sounds. She has conducted studies in phonetic cue weighting and phonetic variation, loanword phonology, and differences in segmental perception in bilinguals and monolinguals.

Research Associates

Irina Marinescu

Irina has a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics and works in phonetics, language acquisition and bilingualism and is interested in synchronic and diachronic variation in Spanish and other Romance languages.

Yadira Alvarez

Yadira Álvarez holds a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Toronto (2019) with a specialization in syntax. Her research interests are argument structure and realization, event structure and syntactic representation, and, more generally, the interface between syntax and phonology. She is currently working on Spanish concordance.

Research Assistants

Miguel Barreto

Miguel Barreto is an Electrical Engineer and hold an MSc in Applied Statistics and MSc (c) in Electrical Engineer with a data science background.
His research interests include statistical models, machine learning, natural language processing, mathematical & computational linguistics, signal processing, and reproducible research. His role in the project is statistical consultant.

Laura Canjura

Laura Canjura graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor’s degree in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Born in El Salvador, Laura has worked with the University of Toronto’s Spanish and Portuguese department since 2023. She has worked with Bilinguals in Toronto since the fall of 2024, aiding in data collection, analysis, and participant recruitment.

Crystal Chen

Crystal is a Linguistics PhD candidate from the University of Toronto. She specializes in theoretical and experimental semantics with a special interest in the acquisition of demonstrative reference. She also has an MSc in Statistics and is quite interested in the various ways statistics can be used to investigate linguistic questions.

María Duarte Marcano

María graduated from the University of Toronto with a double major in Linguistics and Spanish.
Her research interests are phonetics and phonology, language variation, bilingualism, and language acquisition.

Laura Escobar

Laura is a PhD student in the department of linguistics at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include sociophonetics, language and gender, and heritage languages.

Antar Figueroa Canales

Antar Figueroa Canales is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto pursuing a double major in Philosophy and Mathematics. His academic interests lie at the intersection of logic, language, and quantitative analysis. Antar is actively engaged in the research community, contributing to studies on algorithmic governance and AI policy for the Centre of Disinformation Studies. He brings strong analytical skills from his multidisciplinary background and practical experience in research communication, data compilation, and team management. Antar is well-equipped to contribute to his linguistics internship, applying his proficiencies in communications, recruitment, and statistical post-data processing.

Yuria Koike

Yuria Koike is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto. Her interests are bilingualism and Spanish, along with environmental chemistry and Earth system processes.

Arielle Nelson

Arielle Nelson is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, pursuing a double major in Spanish and Economics with a Focus in Data Analytics. Raised in Trinidad and Tobago, she aims to apply her diverse studies and background to economic policy in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Gabriella Pareja Duarte

Gabriella Pareja Duque is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto double majoring in Spanish and classics. She has a keen interest in linguistics and hopes to bring her unique perspective as a Colombian heritage speaker of Spanish to the project.

Natalia Rigonatto

Natalia Rigonatto is a PhD student in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on second language acquisition, bilingualism, phonetics and phonology, and prosody.

Dani Skiko

Dani is completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto in the Psychology and Spanish programs. She is hoping to pursue clinical psychology, and she has a passion for Spanish language and Hispanic culture.

Elyse Wong

Elyse Wong is an undergraduate student studying Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include early child language acquisition, heritage languages, and social signaling among immigrant and bicultural populations.

Cindy Zhang

Cindy is a fourth-year University of Toronto student majoring in Linguistics and Physics with a minor in Computer Science. Passionate about applying technology to second-language acquisition, she combines expertise in scientific computing and bilingualism to analyze and visualize experimental data.