Plenary Sessions
About Dr. Shin:
Naomi L. Shin is Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of New Mexico. Her research program rests on defining grammar as a set of probabilistic patterns rather than categorical rules. This approach has guided her research on child language and bilingualism. For example, her investigations into monolingual and bilingual children’s acquisition of morphosyntactic patterns indicate that children attune to distributional tendencies in the input, and that variable patterns emerge first with high-frequency linguistic items. Most of Shin’s bilingualism studies have focused on Spanish-English bilingual communities in the U.S., including child heritage speakers of Spanish, and underscore the complex, structured variation that pervades bilinguals’ grammars. Extending beyond U.S. communities, Shin’s current, collaborative, project investigates nominal demonstrative use and conceptualizations of space in bilingual communities in the U.S. and in the Peruvian Amazon. Findings from this project indicate that the interlocutor’s location and attention shape demonstrative use across typologically diverse languages. Other collaborative endeavors include co-directing UNM’s and UNM’s Grand Challenges, both of which are engaged in research on children’s acquisition of minority languages and community outreach efforts promoting bilingualism and tackling linguistic bias in New Mexico. Shin has also developed a sociolinguistic approach to teaching Spanish grammar that culminated in a co-authored textbook. Her editorial work includes serving as an Associate Editor for the journal Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, and she will soon be an Action Editor for the journal Language Development Research. Shin originally hails from Brooklyn, New York, and she completed her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
About Dr. Torres:
Julio Torres is Professor of Spanish Applied Linguistics & Multilingualism in the with courtesy appointments in the and Department of at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He directs the and serves as the academic coordinator for the heritage Spanish writing courses at UCI. His research interests include heritage/second language acquisition, multilingualism, cognition, and task-based language learning. His publications have appeared in venues such as Studies in Second Language Acquisition and The Modern Language Journal as well as edited volumes and handbooks. He's the co-editor of the 2022 volume  with Routledge Press. He serves as an Associate Editor of the Professor Torres is the recipient of the 2014 Russell Campbell Young Scholar Special Recognition Award for the field of heritage language education and of the at UCI. He also works as a teacher educator with K-16 teachers/instructors in designing task-based instruction and curriculum for heritage language students.Â
About Dr. Travis:
Catherine Travis is Professor of Modern European Languages at the Australian National University (ANU), and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her research addresses the ways in which linguistic and social factors impact language variation and change, in particular in socially diverse communities. She has conducted large-scale projects applying quantitative methods to spontaneous speech data from English and Spanish, in monolingual and bilingual communities. She is co-author of Bilingualism in the Community: Code-switching and Grammars in Contact (CUP 2018; ), and of 'The intersection of ethnicity and social class in language variation and change’ (LVC 2025; ). Catherine completed her undergraduate degree in Linguistics and Japanese at the ANU (1993), and her PhD in Linguistics and Spanish at La Trobe University, Australia (2002). She worked for 10 years in Linguistics and Spanish at the University of New Mexico, before returning to the ANU in 2012.