Dr. Cristina Sanz studies the impact of cognitive variables on third-language acquisition. Her goal was to systematize an evaluation process that would measure the effects of different treatments, particularly computer lessons. Prof. Sanz asked CNDLS for assistance with a web application that delivers a series of pre-, post-, and delayed post-tests to bilingual subjects. The application was to record student responses and to collect data for subsequent analysis.

CNDLS worked with Prof. Sanz and two graduate students, Harriet Bowden and Cathy Stafford, to design a web application that delivers lessons and records student interaction and response times in a database. The team built a Flash application that allowed Prof. Sanz to study language acquisition by examining how monolingual and bilingual students respond to a timed exposure to sequences of images, text, and sounds designed to teach Latin. Subjects' responses to subsequent quiz questions were collected and timed down to a fraction of a second.

Prof. Sanz's research required that the sounds and images be delivered in precisely timed sequences. She also needed to be able to collect data from subjects in various locations around the world. CNDLS developers chose Flash as a client technology, as it was able to preload materials from the web and present them correctly. ColdFusion scripts collect all the user data in a central database, giving Dr. Sanz's team flexibility in selecting populations of subjects.

CNDLS statistician, Dr. Rusan Chen, worked with Prof. Sanz on analyzing and preparing her data for publication. The project has been presented at several major disciplinary conferences, and Dr. Sanz has continued to publish on the subject. Four of Dr. Sanz's graduate students, including Catherine Stafford, have using a slightly revised version of the application for their dissertation research.