Welcome

My name is Victoria Mateu [vɪk.ˈtɔ.ɹi.ə mə.ˈtew]. I’m an Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

My primary areas of interest are child language acquisition (monolingual and bilingual), heritage and second language (L2) acquisition, morphosyntax, language processing, word/morphological segmentation, and the insights that cross-linguistic and acquisition data can provide on these topics.

Click the links above to access my CV, research (including downloadable papers), and teaching materials.

Recent & Upcoming events​

• Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure.

• Talk to be presented at BUCLD 50 ‘Ellipsis in contact: VPE and sluicing in Spanish heritage speakers’ (with Erin Mauffray and Rodrigo Ranero)

• Talk to be presented at BUCLD 50 ‘Resyllabification as a form of onset repair by English-learning children: A look at production and comprehension’ (with Dhanya Charan and Megha Sundara)

• Talk to be presented at Going Romance 2025 ‘Aux-stranding VPE in Heritage Spanish: Consequences for Ellipsis Licensing’ (with Erin Mauffray and Rodrigo Ranero)

• Talk presented at Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA) 2025 ‘The comprehension of sluicing by Italian-acquiring children’ (with Elena Pettenon and Emanuela Sanfelici)

• Awarded Global Research Award for project titled ‘Spanish Language Acquisition in Children: A Transnational Research Collaboration’ (with Megha Sundara) ($50,000)

• Awarded UCLA Social Impact Collaborative Seed Grant for project entitled ‘A community-centered approach to supporting dual language learning’ (with Megha Sundara & Laurel Perkins) ($50,000)

• Paper in print ‘Number, shape, and intervention effects in child Mandarin passives’ (with Minqi Liu and Nina Hyams). Language Acquisition.

• Chapter in print ‘The Acquisition of Syntactic Categories in a Child’s First Language’ In International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition. Elsevier.

• Paper published: ‘Elided questions in child Spanish: Where do prepositions go?’ (with Nina Hyams) In Proceedings of the 49th Boston University Conference on Language Development. Cascadilla Press.

• Paper published: ’28-month-olds use inferred thematic relations to bootstrap intransitive verb meanings’ (with Laurel Perkins & Nina Hyams) In Proceedings of the 49th Boston University Conference on Language Development. Cascadilla Press.

• Paper published: ‘Intervention effects in the acquisition of Italian sluicing: The role of Number Mismatch’ (with Elena Pettenon & Emanuela Sanfelici). In Proceedings of the 49th Boston University Conference on Language Development. Cascadilla Press.