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

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.

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 is a fourth year student at the University of Toronto with broad interests in math, science and social science. She brings a wealth of experience to the project as a native speaker of Spanish and of English, and an excellent understanding of being a bilingual in Toronto.

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.

Nicolás Koski

Nicolas Koski is a fourth-year student at the University of Toronto, double majoring in Political Science and Latin American Studies. His interests include global politics and human rights, and he plans to pursue a career in international relations.

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.

Andrea Levinstein Rodríguez

Andrea is a PhD student specializing in Hispanic Linguistics. Although her training is in the use of laboratory methods to learn about sentence structure (experimental syntax), she has recently taken an interest in Spanish grammatical gender from a sociolinguistic perspective.