I have been a faculty member in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Ohio State University since 2007. I am part of the Hispanic Linguistics program, and I conduct my research and teaching within this field.
I work on phonetics and phonology from a myriad of perspectives including laboratory phonology, sociophonetics, and second language acquisition.
In Lab Phonology, my research combines theory with experimental methodologies and illustrates how phonetic data, both from production and perception, can help us develop models to explain sound patterns. I have worked on different topics including: the role of contrast in the shaping of sound patterns – in phonetic processes such as the obstruent voicing effect, and in phonological phenomena such as vowel harmony-, the representation of duration and its linguistic use – including compensatory lengthening and other types of lengthening processes -, and the phonetics and phonology of voicing – including final devoicing and voicing assimilation.
In addition, I am interested in Second Language Acquisition of Phonology, with a focus on new methodologies and instructional implications. I am part of Our Voices/Nuestras Voces project, which combines pedagogy and research in linguistics. More precisely, I work on the component of this project that explores second language acquisition of Spanish pronunciation by native speakers of English.
In terms of Sociophonetics, I am interested in phonetic variation in two areas: dialectal phonetic variation in production and perception and the role of bi/multilingualism, and speech adaptation in popular music. This latter project, framed within the sociolinguistic of Pop Culture, looks at accommodation to a Mid-Atlantic accent by British singers shedding light into the linguistic conditionings that govern the variable adaptation of certain dialectal features and addressing the multimodality of this phenomenon.
I supervise the SPPO Speech Analysis Lab.
Education
2007 Ph.D. in Linguistics, specialization in Hispanic Linguistics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. Dissertation: “Minimal contrast and the phonology-phonetics interaction”
2003 M.A. in Linguistics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
2000 B.A. in English Philology, University of Deusto, Bilbao, Spain.
1999 Erasmus Student Scheme Scholarship, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany