I am a field linguist and linguistic anthropologist with an areal commitment to lowland South America.
My research includes both language documentation and theoretically driven work in pragmatics. I have conducted over 24 months of in situ fieldwork with speakers of Ticuna (isolate) and Máíhɨ̃ki (Tukanoan), two languages of northwestern Amazonia.
I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in August 2019. Currently, I am an NSF SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellow, affiliated with the Department of Linguistics at UT Austin. I was also previously affiliated with the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen.
In my current postdoctoral work, I study language development and the development of general interactive skills in children learning Ticuna. Specifically, I’m interested in the emergence of joint attention-associated behaviors — pointing, gaze following, and the use of demonstrative words like this and that — in infants and young children. Read more about my research with Ticuna speakers on the Research page.
Contact Me
Reach me via email at amalia dot skilton at austin dot utexas dot edu.
Please note that I no longer have access to the email address amalia dot skilton at mpi dot nl.