Current Projects

Oral fluency and lexical knowledge in heritage Brazilian Portuguese

This research project examines oral fluency in heritage speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on how lexical knowledge and cognitive fluency contribute to speech performance. It investigates vocabulary size, vocabulary depth, and speed of lexical access as predictors of fluency. Using vocabulary tests, lexical decision tasks, and oral picture descriptions, the study analyzes objective fluency markers such as speech rate and pauses across two languages. Findings aim to clarify relationships among lexical domains and improve understanding of bilingual language organization. (PI: Alexandre dos Santos)

The acquisition of derivational morphology and reading proficiency in Portuguese as a heritage language

Derivational morphology acquisition is understudied in heritage languages, with a particular research gap in Portuguese. This project investigates the development of this late-acquired, rule-based word formation system in adult Portuguese heritage speakers. The study aims to correlate derivational morphology competence with reading proficiency and to examine how limited input affects these specific grammatical skills. (PI Marco Túlio Bittencourt)

Heritage Language Vocabulary Assessment 

This is an ongoing collaboration between members of the Polyglot Lab and the Laboratório de Psicolinguística at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG - Brazil). The current collaboration has led to the development of a vocabulary-level test (VLT) for Portuguese as a second language, now in its second version, which is being used with heritage speakers of Portuguese in Massachusetts.  PIs: Alexandre Alves Santos (UMass), Thaís de Sá (UFMG) , Ricardo de Souza (UFMG), Luiz Amaral (UMAss).

Students' perceptions of written feedback and their possible correlations with language development 

The goal of this project is to examine possible correlations between how students interpret and judge different types of written feedback and the impact these multiple forms of feedback may have on their language development. This is a recent project started by Maria Teresa Megia Cespedes. 

Writing development in Portuguese heritage language 

Project by Jaquleline Ionson (description coming soon) 

Current Projects

Reclaiming physical and communicative spaces for language revitalization

This project investigates language displacement and vitality as the result of a series of local actions within a given minoritized speech community and proposes revitalization strategies from a community-centered language-planning perspective. The goal is to reclaim physical and communicative spaces for the endangered language using experiential learning techniques that involve ancestral knowledge transmission procedures and culturally sound practices. (PIs: Luiz Amaral and Carla Costa)

Chatino language revitalization through literacy workshops

Chatino is an Otomanguean language spoken in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. This project was designed and implemented by Isaura de los Santos in her native community of Panixtlahuaca. She created workshops where children, language teachers and elderly speakers came together to learn local cultural traditions and stories while creating written materials for young learners. This is the topic of her dissertation to be defended in the near future. (PI: Isaura de los Santos)

Pedagogical materials for minoritized language instruction 

This project began in 2013 as a series of consultations to create pedagogical grammars for Brazilian indigenous languages. Almost ten years later, it became a full-fledged research project on how pedagogical materials and activities for language transmission can be designed to meet the language-planning specifications of revitalization projects for indigenous languages.  Several publications present projects and discuss their theoretical and practical implications for language transmission in revitalization contexts, including Amaral (2020a, 2020b, 2018, 2011, and to appear), Amaral et al. (2017), and Silva, Amaral, and Maia (2014). See this page for references. There are also videos in Portuguese introducing topics on language revitalization that can be found here or on this YouTube channel. (PI: Luiz Amaral)

Language instruction in Quechua

Project by Carlos Flores Quispe (description coming soon)

Previous Projects in Language Learning 

Multiple Grammars and Second Language Representation

By examining the acquisition of the overt pronoun constraint in Spanish by native speakers of English, Amaral and Roeper (2014a, 2014b) presented an extension of the multiple grammars theory (Roeper, 1999) for L2 representation. The results and discussions about the proposal appeared in a special volume of Second Language Research.  

Assigning Grammatical Gender to Novel Nouns in L1 and L2 Spanish

This project investigated how native Spanish speakers and Spanish learners who speak Brazilian Portuguese and English assign and process grammatical gender for novel Spanish nouns. Findings indicated that while native speakers rely on syntactic cues, Portuguese speakers heavily utilize morphophonological shapes, and English speakers depend on noun endings. Additionally, the study identified masculine as the unmarked, default gender, with all groups finding feminine assignment more challenging. You can find the full study in Andie Faber's Ph.D. dissertation, available on the UMass Amherst scholarly repository. 

The Acquisition of the Present Perfect in English and Spanish by L1 Portuguese Speakers

It is well established that languages typologically closer to the learner's native language are more easily acquired, as they offer greater opportunities for positive transfer. In such cases, it is important to investigate whether this facilitative effect is general across the grammar or specific to certain shared properties. This project focused on the acquisition of the present perfect in English and Spanish by native speakers of Portuguese. In typological terms, Spanish is much closer to Portuguese than to English, since Spanish and Portuguese share not only an enormous number of lexical items but also many grammatical properties. However, the present perfect is one area where the grammars of Spanish and English converge and, in turn, diverge from Portuguese. The project's goal was to observe the performance of Portuguese L1 speakers in comprehension and production experiments in both English and Spanish to see if they behave differently given the characteristics of the three languages. The results appeared in Isaac McAlister's Ph.D. dissertation. 

Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning

TAGARELA is an intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) system that works as an intelligent electronic workbook and provides students with opportunities to practice their reading, listening, and writing skills. Because it is a web-based system, it can be used anywhere there is a computer with internet access. TAGARELA uses Natural Language Processing technology to analyze students' input and detect spelling, morphological, syntactic, and semantic errors. This project was developed in collaboration with Detmar Meurers and Ramon Ziai (University of Tübingen).

LangBot was a project proposed and designed by Scott Payne (Amherst College). LangBot is an instant-messenger (IM) computer program that enables students to have queries about various foreign languages answered in real-time, online. The tool that operates as a human IM "buddy" searches various language web sites and a specially developed corpus of language to respond to student queries. The project was funded by the US Department of Education.