My work focuses on socially conditioned variation in speech production and perception in Spanish. That is, I uncover the social meanings attached to phonetic variants and determine what implications these associations have for speakers and their interlocutors.

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My earlier research interests were related to contact. In one project, Kim Potowski and I published a paper on a project targeting heritage speakers’ and L2 learners’ perceptions of codeswitching in fairy tales. We aimed to determine whether these two groups of listeners responded differently to oral codeswitches from familiar fairy tales, and whether the location of the codeswitch within the utterance affected listeners’ responses. We found that heritage speakers’ and L2 learners’ responses to the codeswitches were not significantly different from one another, demonstrating that L2 learners can develop a syntactic sensitivity to codeswitching points, at least in a controlled task like this one. Additionally, my earlier research took advantage of the local Los Angeles setting to examine dialect contact among persons of Chilean descent and speakers of the predominant dialects of Mexican and Salvadoran Spanish. This research revealed evidence of shifting language attitudes: the longer Chilean immigrants had lived in Los Angeles, the more their perceptions of prestige shifted toward Chilean Spanish and away from Mexican and Central American Spanish. This research has implications for theories about dialect contact in the United States; namely, it provides evidence of linguistic divergence from a dialect underrepresented in contact literature. I presented this work at a few conferences.

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My later work demonstrated a shift toward sociophonetics, due to training in Spanish sociolinguistics and acoustic phonetics, and I presented a paper in Spain (my first visit!; VI Congreso de Fonética Experimental (CIFE)) in Fall 2014.

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My dissertation, “Plural production and perception in Santiago Spanish,” examined the phenomenon of plural –s deletion in Chilean Spanish, and I analyzed the sociolinguistic interview speech of 60 Santiaguinos to determine who used acoustic strategies on the vowel before /s/ to indicate plurality. You can get it from Proquest (too big to upload here!).

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Franny Brogan and I recently published a paper on onset /s/ weakening in El Salvador, demonstrating through multiple statistical methods a need to rely on both traditional segmental approaches to sociolinguistic variation due to their saliency for listeners, as well as modern acoustic analysis.

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Another paper is in the works with my coauthor Brandon Rogers, who works on Concepción (Chile) Spanish. We aim to determine how Chilean speakers produce /p/, /t/, and /k/ in intervocalic position (as in <la pasta>, <la taza>, and <la casa>), and how speakers interpret the weakening of these sounds. In an invited submission to an edited volume on speech perception in Spanish, Brandon and I determined that listeners tend to perceive speakers who produce /k/ with more voicing (closer to something like <la gasa>) as more Chilean, but this effect is only evident when the stimuli speaker is male. That is, listeners are only sensitive to male voicing of /k/, suggesting that male speakers have access to an identity marker that females do not. We've added a third collaborator, Mauricio Figueroa at the U de Concepción (Chile) with whom are currently preparing another experiment on /k/ for data collection this fall in Chile, and anticipate submitting the results for publication in early spring of 2019. We aim to have studies on all three variables submitted for publication by the summer of 2021.

 

Editors of a forthcoming volume on Chilean Spanish recently accepted a paper proposal in which I use a dynamic acoustic approach to examine production of liquids /r/ and /l/ in syllable final position, as in harto and alto, among speakers in Santiago. Switching of these segments is predominantly associated with Caribbean dialects of Spanish, but I show that use of /r/ for /l/ (as in argunas) and /l/ for /r/ (as in pelsonas) is frequently found among working-class Santiago speakers. My analysis shows that /r/ and /l/ switching is characteristic of speakers over the age of 25, and that young women lag behind young men in eschewing the use of this stigmatized variable. Previous work has shown that women tend to uphold linguistic standards more frequently than men, and I attribute this alternative finding to the upward mobility of the males as compared to the females in my sample. 

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My next next project will be on the palatalization of vowels following velars in Chilean Spanish-- more to come!

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