Dr Amalia Skilton is a Chancellor's Fellow in Linguistics & English Language. Prior to joining Edinburgh, she received degrees from Yale University (BA, 2013) and the University of California Berkeley (MA, PhD, 2019), and held research positions at Cornell University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Skilton’s research has been extensively supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Research interests:
I’m a field linguist and linguistic anthropologist, meaning that I study how people use language in interaction across cultures. I’m especially interested in child-caregiver interaction, language acquisition, pragmatics (word meaning in context), and documentation of endangered and Indigenous languages. All of my research is based on my own fieldwork – I have conducted over 26 months of fieldwork in the Amazon Basin with speakers of two Indigenous languages, Ticuna (a language isolate spoken in Peru, Colombia, and Brazil) and Máíhɨ̃ki (a Tukanoan language spoken in Peru).
My current projects include (1) describing and analyzing young children's acquisition of Ticuna; (2) writing an academic reference grammar, in English, and an educator-oriented pedagogical grammar, in Spanish, of the language; and (3) with collaborators at the University of New Mexico, investigating how bilingualism affects people's use of demonstratives (words like this/that and here/there) in three bilingual communities in Latin America. I also maintain an interest in the digital humanities - in particular, creating tools for collecting, analyzing, and archiving digital materials in Indigenous languages of the Americas.