Ellen is a fourth year PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese studying Hispanic Linguistics. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Linguistics from Purdue University and a Master of Arts in Spanish with a concentration in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Arizona. Her research interests are phonetics and laboratory phonology, second language phonological processing, psycholinguistics, and Spanish as a heritage language. Her dissertation focuses on the perception and lexical processing of English fricatives in L1 Spanish and L1 Portuguese L2 learners of English. She is also the Assistant Editor of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies (AJHCS), and she is a member of the Graduate Association for Spanish and Portuguese (GASP).