Update: As of April 29, 2024, I am moving to the University of Edinburgh to start a tenure-track position in the Department of Linguistics & English Language.

I study language use in interaction across cultures and the lifespan. My research interests include first language acquisition, pragmatics, and language documentation. 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 (isolate) and Máíhɨ̃ki (Tukanoan).

As of July 2021, I am a Klarman Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University. Previously, I was an NSF SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellow, affiliated with the Department of Linguistics at UT Austin and the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. I received my PhD from Berkeley Linguistics in 2019.

In my current postdoctoral work, I study language acquisition and pragmatic development in young children (aged 1-7 years) learning Ticuna. Read more about my research with Ticuna speakers on the Research page.

Contact Me

Reach me via email at amalia.skilton at cornell.edu or at my permanent alumni email, amalia.skilton at berkeley.edu.