Victoria Mateu

Assistant Professor
Department: Spanish and Portuguese
victoria.e.mateu@gmail.com
Website
Keywords: Latin America, Language Proficiency, Linguistics

Victoria Mateu completed her Ph.D. in 2016 at the UCLA Department of Linguistics and then held a position as Lecturer in Linguistics and Lab Manager of the UCLA Language Lab for three years. She joined the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese in 2019.

The core of her research program consists in using experimental methodologies to investigate how children and adults represent language, particularly Spanish. Specifically, she is interested in investigating: (i) what morphosyntactic constraints operate in these two populations, and (ii) crosslinguistic differences – between Spanish and English primarily – and what divergent developmental paths can tell us about the underlying grammars of these languages. She is also interested in language processing and assessing whether children’s difficulties have their roots in their developing grammar or their developing performance system.

In addition to child and adult L1 syntax, she has also investigated word prosody and segmentation abilities in monolingual and bilingual Spanish and English infants, and is interested in further exploring how different populations acquire linguistic properties particular to Spanish.