Lorenzo García-Amaya

Associate Professor

Department of Romance Languages & Literatures

Department of Linguistics

University of Michigan

My research investigates how adults who already speak one or more languages become fluent in another, how multilinguals sustain fluency across the lifespan, and how their languages interact under principles from psycholinguistics. I work with traditionally instructed L2 learners and minimally instructed multilinguals to examine fluency in study abroad, language use across learning contexts, and the effects of audiovisual input. I analyze how cognitive abilities—lexical access, attention control, working memory—and hesitation phenomena shape syntactic complexity and L2 speech. I also study immersion, language use, and interaction using Experience Sampling Methods such as the Daily Language Questionnaire, and I test whether textually enhanced captions support grammar and vocabulary learning. As a core member of As a core member of From Africa to Patagonia: Voices of Displacement, I investigate the link between language and identity through the Patagonian Boers, documenting bidirectional L1–L2 influence in filled pauses among other cross-language phenomena.