Amelia Abbott

Amelia is an alumna of Clemson University, where she received her B.S. in Psychology and Biological Sciences. Her interests evolved to encompass both second language acquisition and signed languages. Currently, her research focuses on understanding M2L2 (second modality second language) acquisition, in which a language user acquires a new language in a different modality (whether spoken, signed, or haptic). Her QP2/dissertation work analyzes the acquisition of sign language by hearing users. She is an active member of UGA's Second Language Acquistion and Cognition (SLAC) research group.

While based in Athens, Amelia taught LING 2100 (Intro to Linguistics) from 2018 to 2022. She worked as an interviewer/rater for UGA's English proficiency test for international teaching assistants (ITA-TEP) for the 2022-2023 season. From August 2022 to December 2023, she was a visiting student at the University of Michigan's Sign Language & Multimodal Communication Lab. As of January 2024, Amelia is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she continues her PhD work remotely and visits with the Lobo Language Acquisition Lab at the University of New Mexico.