This past weekend, students and faculty from UIUC made a strong presence at the Fifth International Conference on Heritage/Community Languages, hosted by the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA. This quadrennial two-day conference focused on heritage/ community language studies as a multi-disciplinary field. It included papers, posters, and panels relevant to heritage language research, pedagogy, and policy – all from the perspective of various disciplines.
Dr. Silvina Montrul presented the panel ‘Dual Language Immersion Education Enhances Morphosyntactic Development in Spanish Heritage Speakers in the United States,’ which also featured input from Dr. Xun Yan as well as Dr. Kiel Christianson (EdPsy), Dr. Jessica Montag (Psychology), and Dr. Pamela Hadley (Speech and Hearing Sciences).
Dr. Montrul also gave the presentation ‘Structural Maintenance and Within-Language Innovations in Spanish as a Heritage Language: Accusative Clitic Doubling,’ which featured research done jointly with Spanish and Portuguese graduate students, Lorena Alarcón, Irati Hurtado, and Karen Pasetto Ovelar.
Linguistics PhD Candidate Paul de Nijs presented his work, ‘Effects of Grammatical Feature Dissimilarities on the Comprehension of Relative Clauses in Adolescent Spanish Heritage Speakers,’ coauthored by Dr. Silvina Montrul.
Linguistics PhD Student Melika Rajabi presented ‘Differential Object Marking in Child and Adult Persian Heritage Speakers in the U.S,’ with coauthor Dr. Silvina Montrul.
Other UIUC representation at the conference included the presentation ‘Social Positioning in Heritage Spanish: Politeness Marking across Morphosyntactic Contexts,’ which was co-presented by Brenda Garcia Ortega (Spanish and Portuguese, Graduate Student). Additionally. Dr. Melissa Bowles, Head of UIUC’s Spanish and Portuguese Department, was recognized at the Olga E. Kagan Tribute & Award Ceremony.
Congratulations to all of these presenters and award winners!
