Welcome!

I am a PhD student in the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Linguistics. I am affiliated with the Language Contact and Cognition Lab and the XMorph Lab. I am co-advised by Marlyse Baptista and David Embick.

My research is centered around how morphemes are stored and processed in bilinguals’ grammars. More specifically, I focus on how bilinguals react to cross-linguistic conflicting grammatical information and requirements. Put in the broadest terms, I am interested in how speakers navigate utterances when their mental lexicon provides more than one possible option (either through multilingualism or other forms of language mixing - like split vocabularies) and what this behavior can tell us about the underlying representations of those options. I work primarily with speakers of Indonesian and Korean.

I can be best reached at pristina[at]sas[dot]upenn[dot]edu, or you can use this link.

My Name

Although I was named after the capital of Kosova/o, my parents adopted an Americanized pronunciation, so my first name is pronounced [prɪˈstinə] or pris-teen-ah. My surname/family name is represented by the Chinese character 官. You can listen to the variations of its pronunciation here, but the Hakka one is the most applicable to my family.