Current Research
Some of the research questions I'm currently investigating:
Are we (as language researchers) accurately assessing and describing multilingual language experience?
Namboodiripad, S., Kutlu, E., Babel, A., Babel, M., Baese-Berk, M., Bhagwat Bassuk, P., Block, A., Carlson, A., Cheng, A., Combiths, P., Hayes-Harb, R., Frederiksen, A. T., Kendro, K., Lin, C.-J. C., Lin, Z., Luque, A., McGowan, K. B., Muegge, J., Tripp, A., Wright, K. E. (Submitted). Essentialist characterizations of language are an obstacle to accuracy, progress, and justice in science.
In this consensus paper, we identify how imprecise essentialist labels such as "native speaker" are harming research, language assessments, and the wider community.
Kendro, K. & Jarvis, S. (2025). Who counts as bilingual? Comparing ideals and identification across researchers and participants. Poster presented at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA): Philadelphia, PA.
In this poster, we presented data from multilingual participants that demonstrates the gap between how layperson participants and language researchers conceptualize bilingualism.
Our public-facing talk was part of the 2025 Five Minute Linguist competition, earning an honorable mention.
Larson-Hall, J., & Kendro, K. (2025). A Constant Decay Hypothesis account of lexical attrition: Evidence from L2 Spanish. Paper accepted for presentation at the 2025 Conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL): Denver, CO.
In this talk, we will present data from L2 attriters who learned Spanish between 1 and 50 years ago that supports the Constant Decay Hypothesis of language attrition.
Kendro, K. & Jarvis, S. (2024). Assessing potential language attrition: The Supplemental Language Attrition Questionnaire. Poster presented at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA): New York City, NY.
In this poster, we introduce an empirically-informed instrument to assess potential language attrition and collect data about the factors thought to contribute to attrition.
Kendro, K., & Jarvis, S. (2023). Lexical diversity across monolingual and multilingual populations. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 45.
Our poster demonstrates substantial overlap in patterns of lexical diversity produced by participants from varied language backgrounds.
What can sociolinguistic variation and perceptions of variation tell us about groups of language users?
Kendro, K., Maloney, J., & Jarvis, S. (2024). Lexical diversity in human- and LLM-generated text. Poster presented at The 46th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
In this poster, we present preliminary data showing that patterns of six lexical diversity dimensions in elicited texts can distinguish between human authors and text created by large language models with high (96.3%) accuracy.
Kendro, K., Maloney, J., & Jarvis, S. (2025). A comparison of lexical diversity measures between human and AI writing. Paper accepted for presentation at the 2025 Conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL): Denver, CO.
In this talk, we will present the full data from our study (n = 240 participants), which shows very high classification accuracy (97.07%) for human vs LLM text yet lower classification accuracy for participants across L1/L2 status (51.88%) or education level (37.24%).
García-Amaya, L., Kendro, K., & Henriksen, N. (2023). Regional variation, articulation rate, and pausing patterns in three varieties of Spanish. In Radek, S. & Volín, J. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 1449–1453). Guarant International.
Our paper presents fluency data from three Spanish varieties, exploring both quantitative variation and mismatch between production data and listener perceptions.
Kendro, K., Akbary, M., Almas, A., & Jarvis, S. (2023). Extralinguistic markers of political affiliation: A corpus analysis of Parler and Twitter. Poster presented at the 2023 Conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL).
Our poster identifies reliable patterns of non-standard capitalization found on Parler but not strongly present on Twitter.
Kendro, K., Akbary, M., & Jarvis, S. (2022). Internet-influenced shifts in compound word formation and usage frequency. Poster presented at The 15th Biennial High Desert Linguistic Society Conference.
Our lightning talk highlights differences in diachronic compound word formation prior to and after widespread Internet availability.
How can linguists work to improve equity in the courtroom?
Jarvis, S., Egbert, J., Akbary, M., Demir, Y., Grixoni, F., Kendro, K., Cunningham, C., & Eggington, B. (2024). Improving the Comprehensibility of Jury Instructions through Empirical Linguistic Methods. Paper accepted for presentation at the 9th Annual Law and Corpus Linguistics Conference.
In this paper, we will detail how we are employing corpus linguistics and human judgments to identify problematic words and phrases in jury instructions.
Kendro, K. & Jarvis, S. (2024). Lexical diversity and perceived credibility in eyewitness accounts. Talk presented at the 2024 Conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL).
In this talk, we presented data showing that lexical diversity can impact mock jurors' perceptions of eyewitness accuracy, credibility, deceptiveness, eloquence, and prestige.