Linguistics graduate student Rawan Bonais presented a paper at the Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA XV), which was held at the University of Nevada, Reno, in March.

Her presentation, titled "The role of language transfer in the development of the demonstrative hada in Gulf Pidgin Arabic,” focused on the work she has done for her Qualifying Research Paper. Rawan’s research interests focus on language contact, bilingualism and language acquisition, as well as the Arabic language.

The GASLA conference provides a forum for discussion of recent, high quality research on second language acquisition, bilingual and multilingual acquisition, psycholinguistics and neurocognition. GASLA brings together researchers working on the nature, use and development of interlanguage in all contexts of bilingual and multilingual acquisition.