Dr. Meg Cychosz, Amy Martinez, Sonia Patrizi

Meg Cychosz (she/her) is an assistant professor of linguistics at UCLA where she directs the Speech and Cognitive Development Team. In her research, Dr. Cychosz studies how infants and children from a variety of backgrounds (children with and without hearing loss, multilingual children) develop speech and learn to produce and process sounds and words. To understand this, Dr. Cychosz has worked with children from all over the world (Bolivia, Mexico, France, Spain, the United States) in an interdisciplinary research program that combines techniques from linguistics, natural language processing, developmental psychology, and electrical engineering. Dr. Cychosz holds a Master 1 in Phonetics from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 and an M.A./Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley. She completed postdoctoral training at the University of Maryland Cochlear Implant Center for Excellence/Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing.

Sonia Patrizi (she/her) is an Italian Speech Language Pathologist with pediatric specialization, experienced in monolingual and multilingual children with various developmental, language and learning delays/disorders. She has worked in multidisciplinary teams and values building connections with families and schools to ensure comprehensive and holistic care. She also earned a Master of Arts in Linguistics at the University of Padova. She is very excited to join the SPOG team to gain more experience and contribute to the research in the SPOG Project! In her leisure time, she enjoys cooking, playing board games, and practicing physical activities including hiking and bouldering.

Amy Martinez, MA has been a research audiologist for over four decades. Her research journey began at UCLA assisting in the study of auditory perception and speech recognition in adults with hearing loss. She joined Dr. Laurie Eisenberg’s pediatric research lab at the House Research Institute and then the Keck School of Medicine, USC, assessing speech perception and spoken word recognition in children with assistive listening devices. She is excited to come full circle and return to UCLA! Outdoor activities are her passion, and has run 19 marathons (so far). In the recent past she started taking piano lessons from her college roommate via Facetime.