Principal Investigators
Our lab has three principal investigators members conducting an active research agenda in several areas of language acquisition.
Melvatha R. Chee
Melvatha Chee's research analyzes child language data collected from first language speakers of Navajo. She primarily examines how children learn to use the morphologically complex Navajo verb. Additionally, she is working to build a Navajo language corpus consisting of stories, narratives, and conversations. Her research interests include first language acquisition, morphophonology, polysynthesis, semantics, morphology, the application of cognitive linguistics to Navajo, and the intersection between language, culture and linguistics, and indigenous language sustainability.
Jill P. Morford
Jill P. Morford's research investigates language acquisition and processing in the visual modality. In particular, she is interested in (1) the effects of language input on the development of language processing skills, and (2) the effects of the visual modality on the structure and processing of language, and (3) bilingual lexical access.
Naomi Shin
Naomi Shin's primary interests include child language acquisition, bilingualism, and language contact. Her research focuses on patterns of morphosyntactic variation, examining how these patterns are acquired during childhood and how they change in situations of language contact. She has two corpora of Spanish child language, which UNM students have used for research. Naomi teaches courses on child language acquisition, sociolinguistics, childhood bilingualism, language change, and Spanish in the U.S., and Gramática española: Variación Social.
