Eleonora Rossi
University of Florida, FL·Psychology
Why do some people learn and keep a language better than others? Research has mostly looked inside the learner, at language background and thinking skills such as attention.
- Fields
Psychology
Social Science
Education Research
- Topics
heritage speakers
heritage language
Spanish
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether the composition and structure of heritage Spanish speakers' personal social networks, mapped through network interviews, predict their written and oral fluency in Spanish and English.
- Track students in a university heritage language program across a semester to see how changes in their social networks relate to changes in language skills, including sensitivity to the Spanish subjunctive.
- Examine how attention and executive functioning interact with social network features in shaping heritage language learning outcomes.
- Build the Bilingual Experience ARchive (BEAR), an online repository sharing language and social network data and modeling tools for bilingual language science.
More about the research
Much less is known about how the people around a speaker, their personal social network, shape learning. This project studies that question in heritage speakers of Spanish. These are people in the US who grow up with a strong family or community tie to Spanish while also being fluent in English. They offer a clear view of how personal abilities and social life interact in language learning.
Why it matters
Heritage Spanish speakers are a growing US community, and many work to maintain or strengthen their family language. Showing how social networks affect language gains could inform how heritage language programs support students. The BEAR archive could give other researchers shared data and tools for studying bilingualism.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Naomi Shin
University of New Mexico, NM·Social Science
Test whether the listener's location affects a speaker's choice of demonstratives ('this/that'), predicting stronger effects in languages with more demonstrative terms, through experiments that vary where the listener is.
Swathi Kiran
Boston University, MA·Neuroscience
Characterize the lexical and semantic impairments observed in bilingual post-stroke aphasia and bilingual semantic dementia, and explain how they arise, using the BILEX computational model's maps and connections.
Canaan Breiss
University of Chicago, IL·Psychology
Run high-powered replications of earlier behavioral experiments on learning language sound patterns to establish which human inductive biases, or built-in learning preferences, are reliable.
The school
University of Florida: 65 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 795 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.