Past SLA Members

Fuyun Wu

As a doctoral student in sentence processing whose secondary interest is Second Language Acquisition (SLA), Fuyun is interested in the issue of L1 transfer in L2 acquisition of complex structures, L2 learners' interlanguage development, psycholinguistic approaches to SLA, and English language teaching in EFL contexts. She worked with Professor Maria Luisa Zubizarreta on a project on English wh-island constructions and how L1-Chinese L2- English learners comprehend those English interrogative sentences both off-line and on-line.

Fuyun Wu is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Linguistic Studies, Shanghai International Studies University. She can be reached at fywu@shisu.edu.cn.

Yan Li

Yan Li received her BA and MA in Chinese linguistics from Peking University in China and came to the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures to study for a Ph.D in East Asian linguistics. Her research interests include studying the role of the L1 in second language acquisition (SLA) and how L2 learners overcome negative transfer effects and the problem of poverty-of-the-stimulus. Specifically, her study focuses on second language learners’ interpretation of negation and negation related phenomena in their second language.

Yan completed her PhDissertation in 2008 and is currently an assistant professor in the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at the University of Kansas. Visit Yan's website at Kansas University.

Eunjeong Oh

Eunjeong has mainly worked on the acquisition of argument structure in the L2. Over the past 4 years, she has studied the acquisition of English dative alternation by East Asian languages speakers and the acquisition of Korean locative alternation by English and Japanese speakers. Recently, she has been working on the acquisition of Korean dative and benefactive passive constructions by English speakers and the acquisition of Korean unaccusativity by Chinese and Japanese speakers. While administering all these projects, she has aimed at deepening the understanding of how transfer manifests itself in L2-learner’s Interlanguage grammar and what role grammatical properties of learners’ L1s play in such process. Her ultimate goal is to attain an articulated characterization of L1-transfer.

Eunjeong completed her PhD dissertation in 2006 and is currently an Assistant Professor at Sang Myung University, Seoul, Korea. She can be reached at eunjeongoh@yahoo.com.

Monica Cabrera

Monica completed her PhD dissertation in 2006 and is currently an Assistant Professor at Loyola Marymount University.

View Monica’s website at Loyola Marymount University

Publication:

The L2 Acquisition of English and Spanish Causative Structures (Paperback)

Emily Nava

Emily is interested in the second language acquisition of prosody and intonation. She is currently conducting a bidirectional study that looks at prosodic transfer in the speech of adult L1Spanish/L2English and adult L1English/L2Spanish speakers. This study examines prominence realization at the phrasal level, as well as changes in L2 speech at the rhythmic/metrical level.

Emily completed her PhD dissertation, entitled "Connecting Phrasal and Rhythmic Events: Evidence from Second Language Speech", in 2010. She currently works at Rosetta Stone Inc. as a researcher/linguist. She can be reached at eanava@gmail.com.