Hi! My name's Elijah, and I'm a first-year Ph.D. student in the Linguistics Department, working with Dr. Rossi.
I was born in Chicago, IL, but I’ve spent most of my life in Orlando, FL. Growing up speaking Spanish and English at home, I’ve seen firsthand how our environment shapes how we perceive language and the world around us. This motivates my passion for research and teaching!
My current research investigates how extralinguistic and language-experiential factors shape individual differences in phonological categorization among L2 learners and bilingual heritage speakers using acoustic measures (voice onset time, formant frequencies, and spectral moments). This work has deepened my interest in sociophonetic methods, social network analysis, and EEG methodology. Moving forward, I aim to employ behavioral (eye-tracking) and neuroimaging (EEG, TRF-EEG) approaches, along with computational modeling, to uncover the neural mechanisms underlying how the brain encodes extralinguistic information, including spoken language and proficiency, from the acoustic signal in bilingual contexts.
Outside of school, I enjoy rock-climbing, roller-blading, playing piano, and karaoke! My go-to songs are "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" from Dreamgirls and "I Have Nothing" or "I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Houston <3