Plenary Speakers

Abstracts

Rebecca Ronquest

From Classrooms to Communities: Uniting Research on Speech in L2 and Heritage Contexts

Research on second language phonology has long recognized that phonological acquisition unfolds along multiple, experience-shaped trajectories. In the case of Spanish, these trajectories are especially diverse, reflecting the wide range of social, instructional, and familial contexts in which the language is learned. Drawing on ecological approaches to language (van Lier, 2004; Steffensen & Kramsch, 2017), this presentation reframes phonological development not as movement toward a fixed target, but as adaptation within dynamic and socially embedded learning environments. Learners encounter Spanish under markedly different conditions: in formal classroom settings, through immersive study abroad experiences, or as heritage speakers who grow up hearing Spanish at home within broader societal contexts where Spanish is not the dominant language. While all of these learners acquire Spanish phonology, they do so within distinct yet overlapping ecologies shaped by differences in input, interaction, identity, and social positioning.

Rather than treating these populations as separate and largely independent, I describe how classroom learners, study abroad learners, and heritage speakers represent interconnected learner ecologies influenced by shared phonological forces. These include the timing of exposure to Spanish, the quantity and quality of input, patterns of use across settings, and the functional and social demands placed on the language. From an ecological perspective, variation in pronunciation outcomes reflects not deficit or deviation, but the emergent consequences of participation in particular linguistic environments.

I begin by defining L2 phonological acquisition within this ecological framework and then synthesize key findings from theoretical and experimental research on classroom learners, study abroad learners, and heritage speakers. The presentation concludes by considering implications for theory, directions for future research, and the teaching of Spanish phonology across diverse learning contexts, emphasizing how classrooms and communities jointly shape phonological development.

Charlie Nagle

Harnessing the big data potential of Lx Spanish

Research on Lx Spanish (Lx = Spanish as a first, second, or additional language) has long been an important contributor to the field of multilingual speech learning. To date, however, most work has relied on speech data collected by individual researchers or small teams from relatively modest convenience samples of Spanish speakers. Collectively, these studies have provided key insight into crosslinguistic phonetic transfer, the intelligibility, comprehensibility, and accentedness of Lx Spanish speech, and the perception and production of sociophonetic variation, to name a few.

While an individual or small-teams approach was a sensible and productive starting point, there is growing consensus that big-team, open speech science offers great potential to advance the field. Large-scale, multisite studies are more likely to capture the range of variation observed in bi- and multilingual speakers and to support more robust, generalizable conclusions. English–Spanish bilingualism, in particular, presents a golden opportunity for this work, given the size, diversity, and sociopolitical importance of this population in the United States and globally. Moreover, this type of bilingualism could be a conduit for population-level sound change.

In this talk, I review key developments in open science that have paved the way for a new mode of research centered on large-scale, collaborative, multisite studies, with examples drawn from pronunciation and speech research. I then argue that Spanish in the U.S. context is especially well suited to initiating this type of work. I propose a research agenda organized along two timelines: in the short term, combining existing data sets and developing shared instruments and tasks that can be incorporated across studies, and in the longer term, collaboratively designing large-scale, multisite projects and building open pronunciation research databases. Together, these efforts can strengthen our scholarly community, contribute to theory, and yield actionable information for policy and practice.

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