Franchesca Arecy is a New York native, born and raised in Queens, New York. Arecy attended the State University of New York at New Paltz to obtain a bachelor’s of arts degree in communication disorders and Spanish with a minor in deaf studies. Following that, Arecy completed her master’s of science degree in speech-language pathology at Howard University. For her master’s thesis, Arecy explored the relationship between multilingualism and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) through a research study to determine if multilingual individuals learn an AAC visual language more completely than monolingual individuals. Currently, Arecy is pursuing her doctoral studies at the University at Buffalo, where she is a research assistant in the Language Learning Lab, which focuses on language acquisition among school-aged children with and without speech and language disorders. She is also an early intervention speech-language pathologist in the Buffalo community.
As a PhD student at the University at Buffalo, her research interests are primarily in exploration of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) children at risk and speech and language disorders. The term “at risk” encapsulates different factors that contribute to a child being at risk such as factors related to their environment, disease, past experiences and so on. Arecy has presented guest lectures in graduate augmentative and alternative communication courses at the University at Buffalo, Howard University, and the George Washington University. Additionally, she has served on panels for different courses and organizations, speaking about her experience as a doctoral student and speech-language pathologist