Ana T. Pérez-Leroux

Ana T. Pérez-Leroux is a Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, and Chair of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Toronto. Her research seeks to understand how children (monolingual and bilingual) learn the syntax and semantics of the smallest and silent components of sentence grammar, including determiners, prepositions, number, tense, mood and aspect, null objects and subjects; and how grammatical complexity emerges from the developmental interaction among the various components. Her current work is on the acquisition of recursive noun phrases.

Prof. Pérez-Leroux teaches courses on language acquisition, Spanish grammar, and bilingualism, and has served in the editorial board of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Borealis, Languages, and starting 2019 co-Editor of Revista de Logopedia y Foniatría.

“It was in kindergarden when I first heard that people in China spoke Chinese. “Even the children?” was what I wanted to know. That evening, I told my father I was worried: “Papa, these poor kids. They think in Spanish but need to learn to speak Chinese to talk to their families.” My work is primarily experimental, and aims precisely at that question: how grammar determines meanings, and how monolingual and bilingual children learn about that, particularly when complex structures and silent constituents are involved.”