Her research interests lie broadly in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and second language acquisition. She use quantitative and qualitative approaches to linguistic analysis. Her work focuses on the use and structure of mitigation and speech acts in Spanish-speaking communities. Recent projects also address linguistic and communication outcomes of short-term study abroad for English-speaking learners of Spanish and the development of a second language corpus. . Previously, she has worked on discourse organization and the use of discourse markers in linguistic mitigation and second language learners’ development of discourse.