Fellows 2017-2018

a young woman (Jackie Alvarez)

Jackeline Alvarez (mentored by Dr. Kaufman)
Jackeline is a senior at Hunter College, where she is pursuing a BA in Spanish-English translation/interpretation in order to work as a professional translator. She graduated with honors from Guttman Community College with an AA in liberal arts and sciences. Since June of 2017, she has been researching indigenous South and Central American languages, such as Mixteco, with Dr. Daniel Kaufman, in association with the New York City Department of Health.
To view her final research project slides, click here.

Daniella Bonhomme (mentored by Dr. Barrière)
Daniella is pursuing her bachelor’s degree in psychology, with a minor in applied linguistics, at CUNY York College. Upon graduation, Daniella intends to pursue a graduate degree in either family and marriage counseling or speech language pathology. She is a native English speaker who also speaks fluent Haitian Creole. Her research interests include language shift, creole- and pidgin-language death, and African American Vernacular English and its geographical variations. Some of her hobbies include reading various novels of different genres, writing fictional stories, and being a step coach for younger girls in her local church.
To view her final research project slides, click here.

a young woman (Daniela Castillo)

Daniela Castillo (mentored by Dr. Shafer)
Daniela is an undergraduate student at Queens College, where she is double-majoring in linguistics and in communication sciences and disorders. She is particularly fascinated by bilinguals’ ability to alternate between their languages and would like to investigate this phenomenon beyond the scope of syntax. As a bilingual herself, Daniela is looking forward to learning a third language, Japanese, and to seeing how it may impact her existing code-switching patterns. Currently, she is volunteering as a research assistant in the Neurolinguistics Laboratory at the CUNY Graduate Center, under the direction of Dr. Loraine Obler, assisting with a project on common noun and proper noun retrieval in healthy older adults. After graduation, Daniela plans to pursue a graduate degree in psycholinguistics.
To view her final research project slides, click here.

a young woman (Sarah Feng) in front of a lake

Qian Min (Sarah) Feng (mentored by Dr. Nissenbaum)
Sarah is a senior at CUNY Brooklyn College, where she is pursuing a BA in linguistics, with minors in psychology and speech. She is a native speaker of both Cantonese and Mandarin. Her research interests include speech acoustics, syntax, and psycholinguistics, leading her to focus primarily on phonology and syntax of Cantonese. She is also a dissertation research assistant for doctoral candidate Jennifer Chard Hamano at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she tests preschool-age Mandarin-speaking children, to understand their syntactic interpretation of different Chinese sentences. After graduation, she plans to pursue a Master’s degree to become a speech language pathologist for children.
To view her final research project slides, click here.

a young woman (Harmony Graziano)

Harmony Graziano (mentored by Dr. Graves) Harmony is from Kaua’i, Hawai’i, and is currently a junior at Columbia University, majoring in linguistics. Her main research interest is creole languages, and she also studies Italian and classical Arabic. Her favorite word in English is ‘solipsism’ and her least favorite is ‘meal’. She is very grateful for the opportunity to research Hawaiian Creole English with the NSF REU Site ILLC program.
To view her final research project slides, click here.

a young man (Zian Jaffery)

Zian Jaffery (mentored by Dr. Moses)
Zian graduated from Hunter College in the Spring of 2016, with a BS in psychology and minors in English and statistics. He is currently a Post-Baccalaureate student at Queens College, studying communication sciences and disorders. He wishes to pursue a career in speech language pathology. Outside of the ILLC program, he is also a research assistant for the Stress in Pregnancy Lab at Queens College (SIP Study), where he helps investigate the interplay between child genetic susceptibility and various in-utero risk factors for sub-optimal fetal growth and child development. His research interests are language acquisition and expressive and receptive language development.
To view his final research project slides, click here.

a young woman (Zaib Javaid)

Zaib Javaid (mentored by Dr. Youmans)
Zaib is a senior at CUNY Brooklyn College. She is pursuing a dual degree in speech language pathology and psychology. Currently, she plans to attend graduate school in order to work with the adult population as a speech pathologist. Besides English, she speaks Urdu and Punjabi. Her research interests include the nature and treatment of speech disorders, language development, and cognitive psychology. Her hobbies include Arabic calligraphy canvas painting, Sudoku, and completing 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles.

a young woman (Elyanna Moskowitz)

Elyanna Moskowitz (mentored by Dr. Barrière)
Elyanna is currently an undergraduate at Touro College where she is majoring in speech and communications. She works at The Oral/Auditory School of New York with young children who have language processing disorders, hearing impairments, and/or speech impediments. She has also worked at Camp HASC, a bilingual camp for individuals with special needs, for the past two summers. After graduation, she wants to work as a speech language pathologist.
To view her final research project slides, click here.

a young woman (Saundra Scott)

Saundra Scott (mentored by Dr. Barrière)
Saundra is currently an undergraduate at the CUNY College of Staten Island, pursuing a BA in linguistics with minors in American Sign Language (ASL) and Studio Art. In addition to learning ASL, she is also learning Korean. She has recently researched r-dropping in New York City English, investigating when and why the phenomenon occurs. When she graduates, she hopes to teach English and/or art.
To view her final research project slides, click here.

a young woman (Daniella Shimoonov)

Daniella Shimoonov (mentored by Dr. Barrière)
Daniella is an undergraduate student at CUNY Brooklyn College, where she is pursuing a BA in linguistics and in speech pathology, audiology, speech, and hearing science. She is also an intern at Yeled V’Yalda Early Childhood Center (YVY), under the supervision of Dr. Barrière. She is a native speaker of English who also speaks fluent Russian and Hebrew, and she aspires to work as a speech language pathologist, both in research and as a clinician.
To view her final research project slides, click here.

a young woman (Moné Skratt Henry)

Moné Skratt Henry (mentored by Dr. Tyrone)
Moné is a junior at the Macaulay Honors College at the College of Staten Island, where she is pursuing a dual degree in linguistics and psychology, with minors in Spanish and American Sign Language (ASL). Previously, she worked as a research intern in the Language Pod at the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio, investigating how adults and children understand native and nonnative accents. Her research interests include language disorders, psycholinguistics, phonology, and signed languages. In the future, she has aspirations to become a speech language pathologist and a certified ASL interpreter. She hopes to leverage her research experiences to both be a better clinician and raise the public’s understanding of language sciences.
To view her final research project slides, click here.

a young woman (Yasmine Sukola)

Yasmine Sukola (mentored by Dr. Nissenbaum)
Yasmine is a senior at CUNY Brooklyn College, where she is majoring in linguistics and communication sciences, and disorders, with minors in neuroscience and psychology. In her free time, she is teaching herself to program code and catching up on her two-month backlog of The New Yorker. She intends to pursue a graduate degree in either speech language pathology, in hopes of working with those with developmental disabilities, or in computational linguistics.
To view her final research project slides, click here.

a young woman (Lisette Vizcarronda)

Lissette Vizcarrondo (mentored by Dr. Nissenbaum)
Lissette is a senior at CUNY Brooklyn College. She is a double major in speech language pathology and linguistics. Upon graduation, she plans to pursue a Master’s degree in speech language pathology, with the eventual goal of opening her own practice. Currently, she assists with the eye-tracking research of Dr. Fuse of the Speech Communication Department at Brooklyn College, and is Co-Treasurer of the Brooklyn College’s National Student Speech Language Hearing Association (NSSLHA) Chapter. Lissette enjoys kickboxing and playing volleyball during her free time.
To view her final research project slides, click here.

a young woman (Amy Wu)

Amy Wu (mentored by Dr. Nissenbaum)
Amy is a senior at CUNY Brooklyn College, pursuing a BA in linguistics with a minor in computer science. She is also studying Japanese and Cantonese. Her research interests are phonology, syntax, natural language processing and programming. After graduation, she plans to pursue a Master’s degree in computational linguistics.
To view her final research project slides, click here.