Sarah O'Neill

Biography

Sarah’s interests lie in second language acquisition, both in theory and in teaching practices. Her dissertation showed that Spanish learners develop intuitions about the relationships between the sounds in Spanish and English cognates such as lake/lago, mountain/montaña, and push/empujar. This shapes the way they recognize and learn new cognate words. Her interest in word learning is also reflected in her teaching, where she helps students develop independent word-learning strategies as they transition between lower- and upper-division language courses.