Alumni
Lobo Language Acquisition Lab Alumni
BriAnne Amador
Originally from San Antonio, Texas, BriAnne is currently pursuing her MA in Linguistics. Her research interests include signed language phonology and signed language acquisition. She is working with Jill P. Morford and Naomi Shin on the Minority Language Acquisition project, coding and analyzing ASL demonstratives use in deaf children.
Aja Armijo
(MA in Speech & Hearing Sciences, UNM)
Aja Armijo is currently a bilingual speech-language pathologist for Los Lunas Schools. She is currently assigned to Los Lunas High School and also serve as the secretary for the district’s union, NEA-LL. She evaluates and treats students ages 3-21 for a variety of speech and language disorders. She also serves on the equity council of Mark Armijo Academy and helps her family with the Armijo Family Scholarship Fund to raise money for
scholarships for students entering the STEM and Education fields.
Joseph Barela
Joseph was raised in Albuquerque, NM, and is currently pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Math. With dreams of working in Silicon Hills one day, his interests include Virtual Reality, Web, App, and Game development. He is specifically interested in advancing his skills as a web developer for the Lobo Language Acquisition Lab.
DeShawna Begay
Diné from Red Mesa, Arizona and is currently pursuing a B.A. in Native American Studies and Population Health at UNM. Navajo language is my passion. Although I am not fluent, I fully understand the language and am hoping to build my vocabulary. I want to be able to use my language to communicate with my people and to my Holy Deities. I hope to pursue a career in public health emphasizing holistic healing in healthcare, where language is a vital part of it.
Isabella Bonura
Isabella is a CODA from a multigenerational Deaf family, she is in her senior year of the sign language interpreting program with a minor in speech and hearing sciences. Isabella became interested in linguistics and research on ASL acquisition during her junior year and hopes to make a valuable contribution to the lab during her time.
Rikki Farrell
Rikki Farrell is a third-year student in the MA Linguistics program. Originally from upstate New York, they came to UNM to pursue a degree in ASL-English interpreting and fell in love with linguistics along the way. Rikki is interested in studying signed languages and is currently assisting Jill Morford and Erin Wilkinson in their study of predictors of ASL and English proficiency in young deaf children.
Huitzili González
Huitzili was raised in Albuquerque and is currently pursuing her B.A. in East Asian studies and Spanish. She is passionate about language acquisition and development as a means to preserve and celebrate all cultures and languages, including Nahuatl, the language that gave her the name “Huitzili”.
Luis Hinojosa-Cantú
(MA in Hispanic Linguistics, UNM)
Luis Hinojasa-Cantú is currently a Middle School Teacher of English and Spanish in Monterrey, Mexico.
Luisa Hurtado Iglesias
Luisa received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Spanish with a minor in Portuguese from the University of New Mexico in 2020. She is currently pursuing a M.A. in Hispanic Linguistics. As a native Spanish speaker, she is interested in language acquisition, bilingualism, and sociolinguistics. She is currently working on a project related to children's acquisition of direct object clitics.
Lyle Jeff
Originally from Crownpoint, New Mexico, Lyle is pursuing a MA in Linguistics. His primary research interests include bilingualism, child language acquisition, and signed language linguistics. He also is passionate about linguistics pertaining to signed language interpreting. Lyle's MA thesis focuses on Deaf children's referent selection in a shared interactional space and will inform the lab's Minority Language Acquisition project.
Keda Kanye
Keda earned her B.A. in Spanish and Linguistics. Her main interests are child language acquisition and cognitive linguistics. She hopes to pursue a PhD in Linguistics with a focus in psycholinguistics.
Devin Lansing
Devin Lansing, originally from Coyote Canyon NM on the Navajo nation, is Bit’ahnii born for a Bilagaana, His cheii is Kinłichíí’nii and his nalí is Bilagaana. Devin is an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico studying Special Education. He plans to earn a Master’s Degree in Special Education before pursuing a career as a Diné Language and Culture teacher.
Baahozhonii Largo
Originally from Casamero Lake, New Mexico, Baahozohnii is pursuing a B.A. in Art History. She also hopes to pursue a B.A. in Linguistics with a focus on Navajo language. Her research interests are bilingualism, language revitalization, and language acquisition.
Cormac League
Cormac League, originally from the Los Angeles area, received a BA in Linguistics from the University of Southern California and is pursuing an MA in Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. As a researcher in the Indigenous Child Language Center, Cormac is interested in the prosody of child directed speech in Diné Bizaad and other languages with vowel length distinction and lexical tone.
Sarah Lease
Sarah Lease is a PhD student in the Dept. of Linguistics at UNM. In her research, she draws on usage-based approaches and acoustic methods to study language acquisition and variation among Spanish-speaking children and adults in the United States.
Elisabeth Baker Martínez
Elisabeth Baker Martínez is finishing her PhD in Hispanic Linguistics. Her primary research interests is in child language acquisition. Having reclaimed her heritage language (Spanish) as an adult, she is especially interested in language development among child heritage speakers of Spanish. Elisabeth has conducted both experimental and corpus studies to understand children's patterns of regularization in verb morphology. Her 2022 publication on children's use of non-standard preterit forms in Spanish children was published in Journal of Child Language. Her article on children's use of non-standard participles forms in Spanish will be published soon in Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics.
Marissa Montoya
Marissa was born in Albuquerque and is a future bilingual high school social studies teacher! She is currently a full-time student at CNM but completed the Mellon Summer Academy in 2021 at UNM. She is continuing to pursue her interest in linguistics and humanities by taking on a research assistant position for the Lobo Language Acquisition Lab while she awaits her full-time semester at UNM in the fall. It is Marissa's goal to find out how to support and serve the bilingual teachers and students in New Mexico.
Jadin Moore
Jadin is pursuing an M.A. in Linguistics. They have interests in language documentation, sociolinguistics, and L2 learning of minority languages by heritage speakers, particularly phonological systems. They are involved in the lab’s research on Spanish-English bilingualism and demonstratives.
David Páez
David is pursuing his Ph.D. in Linguistics. His main research focuses on multimodal strategies for effective communication. In particular, he studies the cognitive processes involved in the interaction of phonetics, morphology, gesture, and discourse in Multimodal Iconic Expressions, David is also the coordinator of the Multilingualism Fellowship in the Lobo Language Acquisition Lab. He is also interested in pedagogical strategies for language teaching.
Molly Perara-Lunde
(PhD in Educational Linguistics, UNM)
Molly Perara-Lunde is currently an ELL specialist, Molly works with bilingual elementary school children K-5. She works with classroom teachers to plan and deliver instruction that supports bilingual language development.
Bettie Petersen
Bettie completed her PhD in Educational Linguistics at UNM in 2022. She has an M.Ed. In Deaf Education Early Intervention from Utah State University. She is passionate about sign language acquisition for deaf/hard of hearing children who have hearing parents. She is currently a Post-doc for the Family ASL project housed in the University of Connecticut's Sign Linguistics and Language Acquistion Lab.
David Player
I originally hail from Shreveport, Louisiana, and I am currently pursuing an MA in Linguistics. My primary interest is in the sociolinguistics of signed language. I hope I will get an opportunity to research how Black signers use American Sign language differently in the post-civil rights movement era. I'm currently working with Jill Morford on coding and analyzing adults' use of demonstratives in ASL.
Raegan Reeves
(BA, UNM)
Raegan Reeves is currently a Film Production Assistant on movie shoots happening in and around ABQ.
Melissa Salas
Melissa Salas is a Latina pre-med student from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is pursuing a BA in Biology and Spanish. Her research interests are understanding the lack of proper healthcare treatment among undocumented families and minority impoverished communities based on language and income barriers.
Alyssa-Marie Sanchez
Alyssa was born in Albuquerque and raised in the East Mountains. She is currently pursuing a bachelor's degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences, double majoring in Linguistics. She is half-Filipino (maternal) and half-Hispanic (paternal) and visits the Philippines with her family every summer. Alyssa was drawn to Speech and Hearing Sciences because of the inclusion of the medical aspect, while also being a more specific path. She hopes to earn her master's in SHS, and eventually use her degree to become a Speech Language Pathologist and an English as a Second Language teacher.
Jesus Sanchez
Jesus Sanchez was raised in Rio Rancho, NM, and is currently pursuing a B.S. in Psychology and B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Statistics. His research interests include studying how bilingualism influences ones' perception of foreign countries and how learning another language as an adult delays mental degradation.
Joseline Segovia
Joseline was born in El Paso, Texas and raised in Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, México. She graduated with an MA in Linguistics from UNM in 2022. Her primary research areas are sociolinguistics, phonology and bilingualism. In the lab Joseline worked on the Linguistic Bias Online Training. She is interested in working with underrepresented communities and applying linguistic research to address linguistic bias and promote language access. She is able to pursue this in her current job as the Language Access Coordinator for Albuquerque Police Department.
Ryan Smith
Ryan is an Albuquerque native pursuing his PhD in cognitive linguistics with a focus in gesture studies and cognitive neurophysiology. His research focuses on the cognitive and physiological relationship between gesture and speech. He is also interested in cognitive and language development in children, and conducts research on child gesture development for Indigenous Child Research Center. He works for the Navajo Language Program investigating children's acquisition of verbal and nominal morphology, and he collaborates with other LLA Lab members to develop outreach materials focused on language variation and linguistic bias.
Nick Sulier
(MA in Linguistics, UNM)
Nick Sulier is currently a PhD student at UC Irvine.
Ashley Toribio
Ashley completed her MA in Speech and Hearing Sciences. Ashley hails from the Pueblo of Sandia, and previously worked at the Tiwa Language Program. She worked on the Minority Language Acquisition Project with Jill Morford and Naomi Shin examining standardized tests used to assess pre-schoolers in New Mexico.
Iyweya Victor
I come from a small town in New Mexico called Farmington. I grew up right next to the Navajo reservation for half my life and for part of it, I was raised by my grandparents on the reservation. I am a fluent speaker of English and I have been studying Navajo and other languages for the past year now and would like to continue. I have a lot of family that speaks Navajo including all of my grandparents and many of my aunts and uncles. I am here at UNM in my 3rd year, studying to go into Nursing and working on earning my minor in linguistics.
