Silvina Montrul is Professor and Head of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is also Director of the University Language Academy for Children and Director of the Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab. She is co-editor of the journal Second Language Research. Her research focuses on linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to adult second language acquisition and bilingualism, in particular syntax, semantics and morphology. She has expertise in language loss and retention in minority language-speaking bilinguals, or heritage speakers. She is author of The Acquisition of Spanish (Benjamins, 2004), Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism (Benjamins, 2008) and El Bilingüismo en el mundo hispanohablante [Bilingualism in the Spanish-speaking World] (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, copyright year 2013), The Acquisition of Heritage Languages (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).