Cristina Manteca Gacho is a doctoral student under the mentorship of Carlos Benítez Barrera. She holds a Master’s degree in Hispanic Linguistics from University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and a Master of Arts in Spanish from Auburn University. Cristina earned her bachelor’s in Teaching and Special Education from Alcalá de Henares University and then received the Benjamin Franklin Scholarship that sponsored her graduate studies in the US. While volunteering at T-OIGO, she discovered a gap in the knowledge of hearing and language acquisition, particularly for heritage language acquisition. She developed a teaching method to help heritage speakers with hearing loss perception and processing gender agreement cues in the auditory modality. Her research interests include hearing loss, early simultaneous bilingual language acquisition, and heritage speakers.