Tania Ionin is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is an associate editor of the journal Language Acquisition. She received a PhD in Cognitive Science from MIT in 2003, with a dissertation on how speakers of article-less languages acquire articles when learning English as a second language. In her research, she uses experimental methodology to examine the interpretation of noun phrases, articles, and related expressions in the grammars of both native speakers and second language learners of several different languages, including English, Spanish, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese. She has published articles in such journals as Second Language Research, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Linguistic Inquiry, Natural Language Semantics, Language Acquisition and Language Learning.