I direct the Media and Language Lab at CSULA, where we investigate children’s and adolescents' interactions with digital media. I am interested in studying children's and teens' construction of their interactive/online culture and in studying how their participation in this interactive culture affects their learning and development in turn.  I have studied teen interactions in the newer communication forms such as chat rooms and blogs and am currently conducting a study investigating teen use of MySpace and Facebook. In my early research in this area, I focused mostly on computers and interactive games and their impact on children's cognition, with a special emphasis on gender issues.   Some of this research is being done in collaboration with the UCLA/CSULA Children's Digital Media Center, for which I am the Associate Director.

In another line of research, I study young Spanish-speaking children's learning of oral English.  I am investigating monolingual English- and Spanish-dominant-speakers' attention to different sources of information (perceptual-ontological information vs. syntactic information) when learning English nouns.  The results of this work has implications for designing ESL instruction and preliminary findings suggest that second language instruction must take into account the syntactic structure of the native/home language and its impact when learning English as a second language.  Another study (in collaboration with Dr. Marlene Zepeda, CSLA) is a short-term longitudinal project, in which we will follow the oral language development in English and Spanish among preschool children from low-income Mexican-origin families of varying acculturative status.