Affiliated Faculty and Staff
Our lab also includes other UNM scholars whose research focuses on and/or intersects with the field of language acquisition.
Barbara Shaffer
Barbara Shaffer's research interests include the grammaticalization of signed languages, stance markers in ASL, intersubjectivity in discourse, and intersubjectivity in interpreted interactions. She has published on the historical development of ASL lexical items, intersubjectivity in discourse, and interpreted interactions. Her work on child language has explored interactions of cognitive and social development with the emergence of stance markers in young deaf children.
Erin Wilkinson
Erin Wilkinson's research interests include bilingualism in signing populations, language change and variation in signed languages, and signed language typology. Her recent research has explored whether semantic overlap in two languages is sufficient to activate cross-language lexical processing in deaf and non-deaf signers. She and her collaborators find that deaf adult bilinguals showed simultaneous activation of ASL signs and English print despite no direct phonetic overlap. They also find evidence for connections between signs and printed words among deaf middle-school students. Furthermore, the studies show that both younger and older deaf signers are much faster at making semantic decisions compared to hearing non-signers. This finding leads to a new line of investigation pursuing the question: what cognitive factors explain why deaf signers process printed words significantly faster than hearing non-signers?
Tamera Yazzie
Tamera is the program specialist for the Indigenous Child Language Research Center, and is also affiliated with the Lobo Language Acquisition Lab. From UNM she earned an MA in linguistics and a BA in speech and hearing sciences. Her interests include first language acquisition, morphosyntax, and language change. She is originally from Gallup, NM.
Paul Twitchell
Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Paul earned his Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics at UNM. His research interests include Deaf education, signed language acquisition among second language learners, and ASL grammatical linguistic features, such as negation. He is working with Jill Morford and Naomi Shin on the Minority Language Acquisition project.
