Kendra V. Dickinson

Kendra V. Dickinson is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, affiliated with the Latin American, Iberian, and Luso-Afro-Brazilian Literatures and Cultures (LAILAB) program. Her work bridges sociolinguistics, morphosyntactic variation, and language contact, with a focus on Spanish and Portuguese. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from The Ohio State University (2022), preceded by an MA in Hispanic Linguistics (Ohio State, 2018) and an MA in Applied Linguistics (Boston University, 2016). She also earned a BA in Spanish from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2011).

Her research employs diverse methodologies, including corpus analysis, sociolinguistic interviews, and quantitative/qualitative analysis, to study how social contexts influence language variation and change. Key topics include past participle variation in Spanish/Portuguese, language brokering among U.S. Latinx communities, and morphological learning in child Spanish acquisition. Recent projects explore digital language contact via memes and computational approaches to linguistic diversity.

Her scholarly contributions span 11 articles since 2018, with 2025 publications focusing on cross-dialectal Portuguese analysis and computational linguistics applications. While no awards are listed, her work demonstrates expertise in multilingualism, heritage language education, and sociolinguistic theory.