Bio

I received a full scholarship from the Ministry of Higher Education, Kuwait to pursue my passion in language learning. I attended California State University Fullerton in 2011 to test the waters of California life. I studied English Literature for a year but it did not hit home. Furthermore, the city life was hectic leading me to move to The Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. In Ohio, I decided that English Literature is not my cup of tea per se and changed into Linguistics in 2012. While at Ohio University, I worked as an American Pronunciation Instructor where I used the vowel and consonant charts, in addition to Liaison and intonation, to instruct L2 English learners from various L1 backgrounds to speak more intelligibly and increase their fluency. I graduated with a BA in Linguistics and a Minor in Philosophy in 2016. After the US, I intended to expand my horizons and move to the far far east, China! I got a tempting job offer as English Teacher in Hangzhou where I spent the year. I acquired Mandarin Chinese naturally through daily interactions with people and coworkers. I had basic knowledge of chinese when I left china.
 In 2017, I moved to the city of Barcelona to do a MA in Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition in Multilingual Contexts. I did the MA in 1.5 years and dedicated my final research to testing the influence and/or contributions of 1) Foreign Language Aptitude and 2) Motivation on speech production in bilingual L2 learners of English. I hypothesized that even though aptitude contributes greatly in the acquisition of L2 English, the focus of the student, whether on complexity of grammatical structures of fluency in speaking, would lead some students with high aptitude to having less fluent speech than those who have a lower aptitude score yet desire and/or are motivated to speak fluently regardless of complexity of their speech. NOTE: we need only around 1500-2000 high frequency words to be able to speak fluently on a day to day basis. Unfortunately, I had an accident and did not invest much into the research at the end. The findings showed that both aptitude and motivation contributed to fluency in L2 English.
The PhD at UVigo is a peculiar one. The investigation aims at testing prominence patterns in tri-constituent compound nouns. The investigation is a follow-up with Plag and Kunter's research regarding the matters. Prominence can be predicted with 3 different hypotheses: 1) the Structural Hypothesis, breaking down the compounds grammatically into a Noun+Noun phrase VS. Adjective+Noun Phrase, 2) the Semantic Hypothesis, using semantic relations and semantic categories between the constituents, and 3) the Analogical Hypothesis, using computer learning to predict prominence patterns based on analogy.  My investigation is a step further in testing these hypotheses while also tapping onto the influence of family size and informativeness on prominence patterns.