Ashley Ghodsian is a fourth-year student majoring in Linguistics and Computer Science with a minor in Spanish Linguistics. Her research seeks to investigate the structural constraints of heritage language. Heritage bilinguals are speakers who have acquired their first language at home, a minority language in the society, along with the majority language, the language of the
community. These circumstances result in situations of unbalanced bilingualism in detriment to the heritage language (e.g., Spanish in the U.S.), as speakers often shift their language dominance when they gain exposure to the majority language through school, media, and the community. Ashley’s research specifically tests certain constructions of questions with heritage speakers of Spanish to see where they judge certain structures to be allowed in Spanish and where they judge them to be ungrammatical. With the results of her study, she hopes to both provide evidence for or against some of the most prominent theories of heritage language as well as to provide some insight into how our minds generate and process language