Alejandro Cuza-Blanco

Promoted to Professor
School of Language and Cultures (Spanish and Linguistics)
acuza@purdue.edu

Cuza-Blanco received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in Hispanic linguistics. His primary area of research focuses on the psycholinguistic processes involved in the second language acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax, semantics and bilingualism. Specifically, he is interested in the role of language transfer, input conditions and age of onset of bilingualism in the acquisition and loss of Spanish morphosyntactic patterns among bilingual children, adult L2 learners and Spanish heritage speakers.

Cuza-Blanco studies child bi-literacy development, language contact and change, Spanish in the U.S., and Cuban Spanish. Currently, he is working on three projects looking at the acquisition of different morphosyntactic issues among speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese and Catalan (Mallorquín).

The Aprendiendo a Leer Program (Learning to Read) is an after school literacy program for Spanish-English bilingual children from K-5th grade. The goal of the program is to help bilingual children to maintain and develop their native language and culture and to communicate better with their family members. The program runs in collaboration with the Tippecanoe School Corporation. About 50 bilingual children participate in the program every semester. Purdue students majoring or minoring in Spanish conduct the teaching. Graduate and undergraduate students participating in the program also have the opportunity to develop research projects relative to the acquisition of Spanish as a heritage language in children and adults. 

He has published Inquires in Hispanic Linguistics: From Theory to Empirical Evidence with Lori Czerwionka and Daniel Olson. Cuban Spanish Dialectology: Variation, Contact and Change is forthcoming from Georgetown University Press.