Liliana Sánchez: Exploring how language affects comprehension and social relationships

Liliana Sánchez, professor of Hispanic and Italian Studies, named a 2024-25 Distinguished Scholar in Humanities, Arts, Design and Architecture. (Photo: Jenny Fontaine/UIC)

Liliana Sánchez grew up in Peru, surrounded by its extensive variety of Indigenous languages. It instilled in her a passion for linguistics at an early age which continued to her years at a Spanish-English school where she was exposed to even more languages.

"The notion that you could be bilingual or trilingual or multilingual fascinated me, and that attracted me to the field of linguistics," said Sánchez, professor of Hispanic and Italian studies in the UIC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Her research focuses on bilingualism, particularly in nondominant languages. She analyzes the linguistic development of people who acquire a socially dominant language. Most importantly, she hopes to discover how languages interact in the human mind and how this interaction impacts social relationships.

She's most proud ofworking with Indigenous people in South America during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand how they received and comprehended medical information about the virus. Due to strict travel and interaction rules, she used Skype, Zoom and cellphone to carry out her research from the U.S. In collaboration with community researchers, she developed culturally appropriate questionnaires in Indigenous languages.

"We developed a network of participants known by the community researchers, and we trained the community researchers to ask questions about how people received the information and their linguistic background," she said.

Respondents told the researchers that while they understood the information they received from community leaders and the media, usually in Spanish, the dominant language, they would have preferred that medical personnel communicated the information in their Indigenous languages. Not only language choice but also content could be modified to be more effective, respondents said, such as by including information on native plants that could complement Western medicine.

Sánchez said the ability of people to understand essential information in their native languages could be a matter of life or death, as exhibited by the thousands of deaths during the pandemic in communities worldwide that lack medical infrastructure.

Professor Kara Morgan-Short called Sánchez a transformative faculty member in the Hispanic and Italian studies department since she began at UIC in 2020.

"The frequency with which she is invited to deliver keynote lectures and the number of graduate students she has mentored and their success in finding academic positions bear witness to her stellar reputation," Morgan-Short said.

Since starting at UIC, Sánchez has co-edited a special journal issue in Languagesfocusing on Indigenous languages of the Americas. She has published 24 peer-reviewed journal articles and earned several National Science Foundation grants.

"The high impact and high quality of Dr. Sánchez's work extends nationally and internationally throughout academia and beyond," Morgan-Short said. "Dr. Sánchez embodies the essence of a Distinguished Scholar through her groundbreaking contributions to linguistic research, her advocacy for underrepresented languages and communitiesand her dedication to mentorship and academic service."