Victoria Mateu

Victoria E. Mateu

UCLA Department of Spanish & Portuguese

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Welcome

My name is Victoria Mateu [vɪk.ˈtɔ.ɹi.ə mə.ˈtew]. I’m an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese (see: www.spanport.ucla.edu/person/victoria-mateu/)

My primary areas of interest are child language acquisition (monolingual and bilingual), heritage and second language (L2) acquisition, morphosyntax, language processing, word/morphological segmentation, and the insights that cross-linguistic and acquisition data can provide on these topics.

Click the links above to access my CV, research (including downloadable papers), and teaching materials.

Recent & Upcoming events​

  • Joined the Journal of Child Language as an Associate Editor

  • Promotion to Associate Professor with Tenure

  • Talk presented at the UCLA Community Partnership Summit: Advancing Research, Creativity, and Learning Together, ‘A community-centered approach to supporting dual language learning‘ (with Megha Sundara)

  • Paper published ‘Featural Relativized Minimality in silence: The acquisition of sluicing in Italian’ (with Elena Pettenon and Emanuela Sanfelici). Glossa

  • Talk presented at BUCLD 50 ‘Ellipsis in contact: VPE and sluicing in Spanish heritage speakers’ (with Erin Mauffray and Rodrigo Ranero)

  • Talk presented at BUCLD 50 ‘Resyllabification as a form of onset repair by English-learning children: A look at production and comprehension’ (with Dhanya Charan and Megha Sundara)

  • Talk presented at Going Romance 2025 ‘Aux-stranding VPE in Heritage Spanish: Consequences for Ellipsis Licensing’ (with Erin Mauffray and Rodrigo Ranero)

  • Talk presented at Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (GALA) 2025 ‘The comprehension of sluicing by Italian-acquiring children’ (with Elena Pettenon and Emanuela Sanfelici)

  • Awarded Global Research Award for project titled ‘Spanish Language Acquisition in Children: A Transnational Research Collaboration‘ (with Megha Sundara) ($50,000)

  • Awarded UCLA Social Impact Collaborative Seed Grant for project entitled ‘A community-centered approach to supporting dual language learning’ (with Megha Sundara & Laurel Perkins) ($50,000)

  • Paper published: ‘Number, shape, and intervention effects in child Mandarin passives’ (with Minqi Liu and Nina Hyams). Language Acquisition

  • Chapter in print ‘The Acquisition of Syntactic Categories in a Child’s First Language’ In International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Edition. Elsevier