People

Dr. Patricia Schneider-Zioga received her PhD in Linguistics at USC. Her main areas of interest have been in the syntax of clitics, antiagreement, agreement, agreeing particles, and copulas. She has worked on a variety of languages including Modern Greek and the Bantu language of Kinande. She is currently interested in the syntax of root small clauses (utterances such as ' class in session.') and the sociogrammar of heritage languages.

Paeng Martinez is a fourth-year student studying Linguistics and Communicative Disorders at CSUF. His main areas of interest in linguistics include heritage language morphosyntax. His current research looks into argument ordering and voice selection in U.S. Heritage Tagalog speakers. He is currently working on his research through UC Irvine's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship.

Viviana Camacho-Aceves earned a McNair Scholarship, a B.A. in Speech Communication, and a TESOL certificate from CSULB, an M.A. in Linguistics, Language and Society from CSUF. She has been a Data Analyst and Researcher in the HLRL. Her research focuses on heritage language speakers and gendered language. Currently adjunct faculty at Santa Ana College SCE. She joins the 2026 UCLA Virtual Heritage Language Teacher Workshop and heads to study in Italy this summer!

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Jonathan Young is an alumni of the M.A. in Linguistics program at CSUF, and also the B.A. and B.S. programs of Chinese and Statistics at UCR. As a linguist, he is interested in anthropological linguistics, etymological change, and historical linguistics. Most recently, he analyzed Sanskrit's influence on Indo-Malay morphology for his master's project. Outside of academia, Jonathan is a Success Ambassador at CSUF GEAR UP.

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Omer Shafi is a CSUF Psychology and Religious Studies major whose academic interests include heritage language retention, identity formation and cultural transmission. He hopes to pursue a PsyD in clinical psychology and is excited to contribute to research on multilingual development.

My name is Ray Alfano, and I specialize in the sociolinguistics of Middle Eastern and North African language speaking migrants in Europe and North America. I have a BA in history, middle eastern and North African studies, and a minor in Arabic and Islamic studies from UCLA, and a masters degree in computer science from CSUCI. I’ve lived all over the USA and the world, and my hobbies are music, exercise, cooking, and reading.

Brenda has a B.A. in Linguistics & Psychology from UCLA, an M.A. in Linguistics from CSUF and an M.A. in Hispanic Linguistics from UIUC. Currently, she is working towards her PhD in Hispanic Linguistics at UIUC where she continues her research on heritage languages and bilingualism. Specifically, she is interested in the production of Spanish morphosyntactic structures by heritage speakers and L2 learners.

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Tarek is a passionate Arabic linguist who has been teaching both Arabic and English for over 16 years. He also speaks German, Spanish, & Italian with varying degrees of fluency and is particularly interested in the morphology of Arabic and its pedagogical applications to teach Arabic to Second or Heritage learners of the language. His Masters project is titled “A Blended Morphological Approach to Teach Arabic to Second & Heritage Learners”. Tarek enjoys linguistic glossing of Arabic texts into IPA, specifically accommodating syntactic snd morpho-phonological subtleties. He’s always excited and ready to assist learners of Arabic learn, understand, and speak the language accurately and competently.