Bethany Keffala, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher in the Communication Sciences and Disorders program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is interested in language acquisition, and her research focuses particularly on phonological development and pre-literacy development in bilingual children. She has over six years of instruction experience for a wide variety of courses in the fields of linguistics and human development. She has also taught French and English as a second language. Dr. Keffala earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from UC San Diego in 2016. Her dissertation, co-chaired by Professor Sharon Rose (UC San Diego Linguistics) and Professor Jessica Barlow (SDSU Speech Language and Hearing Sciences), investigated Spanish-English bilinguals' acquisition of syllable structure and positional phonotactics. Dr. Keffala continues to research aspects of Spanish-English bilingual children's phonological and pre-literacy development in the Developing Language and Literacy Lab at Teachers College.