07/30/2026
The Center for Language Science (CLS) supports student research in a variety of ways. Romi Román Cabrera, a graduate student in Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, received funding from the CLS to support her dissertation research. Read on to learn about her interesting project and her experience as a CLS member.
You received an award from the CLS to support your dissertation research. Could you tell us a bit about your project?
- My project looks at how children and adults produce and understand subject pronouns in Spanish. For example, in a sentence like “Yasmin looks at Mabel, now she spins.” I am interested to see who people think “she” refers to, since it could be either Yasmin or Mabel. This question is especially interesting in Spanish since it is perfectly grammatical and systematic to say things like “Yasmin looks at Mabel, now spins”, omitting the pronoun "she". Spanish speakers may do this variably, and previous research on other types of Spanish has shown that whether or not the pronoun is pronounced can influence how the sentence is interpreted. My research is the first to explore this question in Dominican Spanish, and I am using techniques like eye tracking and asking people to produce sentences in order to investigate their patterns of pronunciation and interpretation.
What is something that you have learned through this research experience that you would like to share with the public?
- Sooo many things. Working with children is a fascinating world! If I had to share one thing it would be the importance of science communication, especially when you conduct research in a community where people might not be as familiarized with research or research practices. It is very important to speak about the project using accessible general audience language and be aware of one’s positionality as a researcher. Some people were a bit skeptical at first about the eye tracker and I had to find ways to explain what it does and its application from the real world so they would feel comfortable with it. One example that always helped was comparing it to the eye‑tracking technology used in gaming devices.
What are your next steps in this project?
- The immediate next step in this project is data analysis, as I'm now looking at the data I collected to see what sorts of patterns emerge. Further ahead, I would like to apply for a postdoctoral grant and expand this work with speakers of other Spanish dialects. One of the broader goals of my research is to contribute to a relatively small area of study that combines child language processing with dialectal variation.
How has being part of the CLS supported your research?
- Being part of the CLS has supported my research by giving me access to a strong interdisciplinary community, which has been especially valuable because my work draws on several areas, including child language acquisition, language development, cognition, and language variation. It has also given me opportunities to get early feedback on my project through conversations with invited speakers such as Dr. Elizabeth Schotter, Dr. Jorge Valdés Kroff, and Dr. Anne Beatty Martínez. In addition, seeing how other members present their work, learning about the kinds of projects they do, and hearing about the challenges they have faced in fieldwork has helped me think about my own research process and approach.
