Rate My Professor Monica Cabrera

Cabrera's research centers on second language acquisition of Spanish syntactic structures, particularly inchoative, anticausative, and periphrastic causative constructions, as well as interfaces between syntax, semantics, prosody, and lexicon. She co-edited the volume Exploring Interfaces: The Syntax of Third Language Acquisition with José Camacho (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which includes chapters on topics such as the role of P in Spanish unaccusative constructions, pronominal clitics in Greek, scope and prosody in Russian heritage languages, dialectal variation in VOS word order in Spanish, and linearization in adjective ordering. Other key publications include 'The L2 Acquisition of Inchoative Structures by L1 Spanish Speakers' (Florida Linguistics Papers, 2016), 'Intransitive/Inchoative Structures in L2 Spanish' (Selected Proceedings of the 12th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, 2010), and a review of Understanding and Teaching the Indirect Object in Spanish by Luis H. González (Hispania 108(2), 2025, pp. 312-314). She has supervised undergraduate honors theses, including Alanna Quinn's 'Grammatical Gender Acquisition in L2 Spanish' (2018) and Lauren F. Wilkins' 'Periphrastic Causatives within Second Language Acquisition.' As an Indigenous Qichwa faculty member, Cabrera participates in LMU's Indigenous Heritage Month observances. She has organized workshops, such as the Workshop on Person & Perspective, and teaches advanced courses on Spanish language acquisition.