I am an Assistant Professor at Creighton University specializing in second language acquisition, with over eleven years of experience teaching graduate and undergraduate courses. My research examines the acquisition of Spanish as a second or additional language, focusing on how bilingual speakers perceive, produce, and categorize speech sounds across their languages.

My recent work investigates how high-variability phonetic training, which exposes learners to multiple speakers from different dialectal backgrounds, can support the acquisition of non-native sound contrasts and the development of new phonetic categories. I examine how learners use this varied input to distinguish sounds in their second language and whether improvements in perception are accompanied by changes in how they produce those sounds. I also examine how these emerging categories may influence speakers’ existing phonetic systems, asking whether learning to perceive and produce second-language sounds also changes how learners distinguish and pronounce sounds in their first language.