Research - Second Language Acquisition

My own experience as a long-time learner of the Spanish language has definitely served as a catalyst to my interest in Second Language Acquisition, the systematic study of the manner in which individuals acquire a second language, or language other than their mother tongue. 

My Spanish second language education has been quite diverse, encompassing At-Home and Study-Abroad undergraduate Spanish studies at Oregon State University and the Universidad de Cantabria (Spain), and At-Home Immersion and Study-Abroad graduate studies at Middlebury College.

The fascination, and sometimes frustration, I experienced in evaluating my own correlating linguistic progress in these different contexts has fueled my interest in the ways that input and learning context converge and the effects they have on language processing, and later, production. Particularly, I am interested in looking at sentence processing and the acquisition of pragmatic features in Spanish second language acquisition.