Rate My Professor Elena Shimanskaya

Elena Shimanskaya is an assistant professor of French linguistics in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she serves as the Basic French Language Program Coordinator for courses FREN 111-212. She joined the faculty in 2019. Her research examines how adults learn foreign and second languages, with a particular focus on the impact of one's native language on second language acquisition, known as L1 transfer. Shimanskaya investigates the ways in which the linguistic knowledge of second language speakers differs from that of monolingual speakers, specializing in the second language acquisition of French. She has presented her theoretical and empirical research on these topics at prominent national and international conferences, including the Second Language Research Forum, the Boston University Conference on Language Development, the Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference, and the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.

Shimanskaya earned her Ph.D. in second language acquisition from the University of Iowa in 2015, with a dissertation entitled 'Feature reassembly of semantic and morphosyntactic features in L2 French.' She previously received an M.A. in linguistics from Syracuse University in 2009. Her scholarly contributions include co-authoring 'Re-assembling objects: a new look at the L2 acquisition of pronominal clitics' in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (2017, with Roumyana Slabakova), 'On the Role of Input in Second Language Acquisition: The Case of French Strong Pronouns' in Language Learning (2018), 'Acquisition of L2 French Accusative Pronouns by L1 Spanish Speakers' in Languages (2021, with Tania Leal), 'The power paradox in bilingualism' in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism (2024, with Tania Leal), and 'Comparing L2 intelligibility for learners of French: Automatic speech recognition versus human listeners' in Foreign Language Annals (2025). Additionally, she co-edited the volume Generative SLA in the Age of Minimalism (John Benjamins, 2022, with Tania Leal and Casilde A. Isabelli).