Andrea Levinstein Rodríguez

PhD Student

Campus

Fields of Study

Areas of Interest

  • Spanish and Experimental Syntax;
  • Second Language Acquisition;
  • Language processing;
  • Relative clauses; Prepositions; Copulas.

Biography

Andrea Levinstein Rodriguez is a PhD student in Hispanic Linguistics. She completed her BA and MA degrees in Linguistics at the University of Calgary. Andrea has been fascinated by language acquisition and processing ever since she first moved to Canada as a teenager. She has worked on prepositional relative clauses from experimental syntax (L1 adults) and second language acquisition (L2 adults) perspectives, and in other syntactic phenomena such as locative copulas.
 
Ever since she had the opportunity to join the University of Calgary's Second Language Acquisition lab during her undergrad, Andrea has been in love with experimental linguistics and sought any opportunity to participate in linguistics research. During her master's, she served as a research assistant for a PhD candidate's dissertation project, and she was also a member of the Experimental Syntax Lab. Since arriving to the University of Toronto, she has joined the Bilinguals in Toronto research project.
 
Andrea prides herself on her teaching, grant-writing and presentation skills. She has been leading tutoring sessions since her undergrad through the University of Calgary's Peer Assisted Support Program, and was sought after as a TA in both the Linguistics and Spanish Departments. Her academic career has been funded by a large variety of scholarship opportunities, most prominently the Marguerite Patricia P. Bannister Memorial Degree Award (2014-2018), the SSHRC-Masters (2020) and the Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship (2021). Of her awards, her honourable mention in the Best Student Poster competition of the 2022 Canadian Linguistics Association annual conference takes pride of place.
 
Outside of academia, Andrea has a track record of advocating for gender inclusivity, accessibility, anti-racism, and otherwise working to create a more inclusive and accessible world wherever she goes. She is also a fan of TTRPG games (like Dungeons & Dragons) and living history practices like historical costuming. She has recently taken an interest in sustainable fashion, and can always be seen with a knitting project at hand.

Education

MA, University of Calgary
BA, University of Calgary

Presentations

Levinstein Rodriguez, A. (2019) The Processing of Relative Clauses in L2 Spanish. Montana-Alberta Conference Of Linguistics (mACOL). University of Montana, Missoula, Montana, Nov. 2020.
Levinstein Rodriguez, A. (2021). Locative and existential small clauses: a comparative study. 2021 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association, online, June 2021.
Levinstein Rodriguez, A. (2022). Optionality in Spanish prepositional relative clauses. 2022 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association, online, June 2022. Poster presentation.

Cohort