Our research lab focuses on multiple areas of inquiry in the area of Spanish Linguistics, broadly defined. Our projects encompass areas related to experimental sociophonetics, second-language acquisition, laboratory phonology, and second-language psycholinguistics. Through our cross-campus collaborations, we have further expanded our scope to topics such as Afrikaans-Spanish bilingualism in Patagonia, syntactic processing through eye-tracking, and grammar learning through textual enhancement and captioning. Read about our projects below or click one of the following buttons to take you to a specific area of study.
We explore sound change and phonological process in Andalusian Spanish, spoken in southern Spain. Research topics focus on processes related to vowel harmony, vowel-to-vowel coarticulation, pronunciation of rhotics, post-aspiration of /sp st sk/, voicing of intervocalic /p t k/, and the use of falsetto. You can read more about a recent conference that we organized here.
Through this interdisciplinary collaboration funded through the University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory, we combine ethnographic, linguistic, and historical methods in order to explore the voices and ideologies of a displaced Afrikaans community that has resided in Patagonia, Argentina for the past 110+ years. You can read more about our project here, and access our digital archive here.
We explore multiple components of the Spanish prosodic system, such as syllable structure, stress, intonation, prosodic timing, and falsetto. Our research on intonation is couched within the autosegmental-metrical approach to intonational phonology. Our research on prosodic timing centers on bilingual communities in South America.
We explore the relationship between studying abroad and oral fluency in second-language Spanish. Specifically, we explore the influence of factors such as attention control and other cognitive abilities, in addition to factors such as syntactic complexity, language use, and degrees of bilingualism, on a speaker's ability to articulate speech in a second language.
We study the effect of syntactic variability on learners' processing of novel sentences in Spanish. Our measures derive from eye-tracking procedures and acceptability judgment tasks. In this project, we collaborate with Julie Boland, Savi Namboodiripad, and Stephen Tobin.
Sample publications forthcoming.
We study the effect of textual enhancement and captioning on the learning of grammar structures in second-language Spanish, such as the preterite/imperfect, the subjunctive, the conditional, and gustar-type verbs.
We strive to communicate our research findings to a broad audience, with the goal of making our research, teaching, and service commitments accessible to a broad non-academic public.