After that, Slabakova embarked on her PhD project at McGill University where she was advised by Lydia White, a linguist who established generative second language acquisition as a separate field.
Slabakova conducted a number of experiments involving ESL learners in Varna to find out whether her results would support any of the theories of SLA which existed at the time.
[8] Slabakova has mentioned that working with her colleague and mentor at Iowa, William Davies, has greatly influenced her demeanor and the way she pursues research.
In her 2008 book, working on the Bottleneck Hypothesis, Slabakova explores how learners make meaning from the newly acquired words and sentences.
[10] In 2017, Slabakova proposed Scalpel Model which posed that the previous languages do play role in the transfer processes at the developmental stages of TLA.