Biography

I completed my PhD program at the department of English Phonetics and Phonology at the University of Stuttgart investigating word order choice, information structure, and intonation of heritage speakers (HSs) of Russian residing in the US. In my PhD thesis, I examined the data of HSs and monolinguals in a corpus of semi-spontaneous narrations (RUEG) in formal (police report) and informal settings (WhatsApp message to a friend). Beyond my PhD thesis I have published on prosodic patterns produced by HSs of Russian in the US and Germany in controlled and semi-spontaneous speech (Zuban et al., 2023; Zuban & Zerbian, 2024; Zerbian et al., 2024). Further, I have also published on syntactic aspects of HSs such as word order alternations, clause types, and left dislocation (Zuban et al., 2021; Martynova et al., 2024; Zerbian et al. 2025). Currently I am investigating the links between bilingualism and cognition in autistic children.