Dalila Ayoun

Dalila Ayoun is a Professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Arizona’s College of Humanities. She specializes in second language acquisition (SLA) of morphosyntax and French linguistics, with a focus on grammatical gender, agreement systems, and tense-aspect-modality (TAM) categories. She is affiliated with the PhD program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT), contributing to both theoretical and applied linguistic research.

Her research explores how learners acquire complex grammatical features in French, Italian, and other Romance languages, emphasizing cross-linguistic comparisons and longitudinal studies. Recent work highlights gender assignment in mixed noun phrases, subtle gender biases, and L2 learners’ processing of morphosyntactic features. Ayoun’s publications include edited volumes like The Acquisition of Gender (2022) and peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Journal of French Language Studies.

Teaching responsibilities include advanced courses in French linguistics (FREN 461A/561A) and translation (FREN 432/532). She has held office hours in 582 Modern Languages Building and was on sabbatical during the 2023-24 academic year. Her work bridges empirical studies with pedagogical implications for language teaching.