As a Research Intern with Tertulias, the research arm of UCI’s Bilingualism Matters California Initiative, Sailee supports the team’s ongoing scholarly and community-facing work across several fronts: contributing to the design and development of professional workshops for educators and researchers, refining and preparing presentation materials for Tertulias sessions, and authoring internal research documentation and summaries that inform the Initiative’s broader research and programmatic direction.
Sailee’s work as a Research Intern with Tertulias, UCI’s Bilingualism Matters California Initiative research arm, includes editing materials like the program’s Annual 2024-2025 Report and workshop slides such as “Preparando el Futuro,” presented to college and graduate students on Spanish grammar as a clinical tool for bilingual speech-language pathology.
This project draws on 30 years of archival data across three independent datasets to trace how bilingual children’s engagement with television, shared reading, play, and video games has evolved over time, and how these patterns compare to monolingual peers. Grounded in home literacy environment theory, it treats media exposure as an informal channel of language input operating alongside formal schooling. The goal is to generate evidence-based guidance for parents, educators, and media developers on designing media environments that support, rather than displace, bilingual language development at home.
Conducted in Mexico City, this project examines how monolingual Spanish-speaking children, with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), organize new vocabulary, comparing taxonomic structures (grouping words by category) against slot-filler structures (clustering words by role within familiar routines). The study also measures cross-category interference to test whether interference patterns could serve as an early marker of DLD. Findings are positioned to inform earlier identification and intervention design for a population underrepresented in the existing literature.
