Projects

Digitalization of the regional linguistic atlases of Spain (Dr. César Gutiérrez)

Within the framework of the Corpus de los Atlas Lingüísticos (CORPAT), this project aims to digitalize the regional linguistic atlases of Spain published during the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. Not only will this facilitate the consultation of these rich and valuable sources of linguistic data, but also it will allow the organization and treatment of those data in a way that will lead to new interpretations and conclusions in the study of the dialectal variation of contemporary Spain.

Philological analysis of Spanish documents from the Early Middle Ages (Dr. César Gutiérrez)

In connection with the works of the Grupo de Historia del Español Norteño (GHEN), this project focuses on the analysis of the paleographic, graphemic and linguistic features of notarial documents produced in Castile and León during the Early Middle Ages (9th-12th centuries) in order to determine whether those documents are originals (they were produced on the date they show), copies (they were copied from originals later in time, in which case it has to be established when), or fakes (the originals never existed and these documents were explicitly written ad hoc falsely to support a given claim). The results from this project are contributing to better contextualize these documents historically and to more accurately date the moment they were written, which in turn makes these documents more reliable sources of information for the linguistic study of the Castilian and the Leonese languages in their formation period.

An exploratory study into the Spanish of North Carolina (Dr. Lauren Miller)

While the United States is predicted to have the largest Spanish-speaking population by the year 2050, its variety of Spanish remains underexplored and stigmatized, with no official grammar of US Spanish and just the beginnings of a dictionary. This lack of reference materials has practical implications for teachers who may be unfamiliar with US varieties of Spanish, and, as a result, rely on reference books written for speakers of monolingual varieties of Spanish. In order to address this gap in the literature, we explore the Spanish of one of the fastest growing Spanish-speaking communities in the United States, North Carolina.

Exploring the effect of an L2 on an L1 in the early stages of acquisition: the case of the English comparative (Dr. Lauren Miller)

This experimental project explores cross-linguistic influence and, specifically, the hypothesis that all of a bilingual's languages constantly interact in a dynamic process. We explore whether a second language can influence a first language by analyzing the use of English comparative forms (e.g. more witty vs. wittier) by native speakers of English who are studying Spanish. We hypothesize that the analytic forms of Spanish (más ingenioso) may lead these speakers native English to change, even in early stages of Spanish acquisition.

Self-evaluation of linguistic confidence by Spanish-English US medical interpreters with different language acquisition profiles and interpreting training (Dr. Sara Fernández Cuenca)

This project investigates how the acquisition profile (L2 or heritage speaker), and interpreting training (a concentration/university degree/ hourly program) affect the level of linguistic confidence experienced by individuals who act as medical interpreters in the US. We explore three different dimensions of self-confidence: linguistic confidence (knowledge and ability to communicate in the two languages), technical confidence (knowledge of terminology and ability to interpret), and cultural confidence (ability to identify and transmit cultural practices).

Use of oral and written assessment tasks to examine acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive in an instructional context: a comparative study with L2 and heritage learners. (Dr. Sara Fernández Cuenca)

Due to the context of acquisition, heritage learners often rely on their intuition (implicit knowledge) and tend to perform better in oral than in written language task. On the other hand, L2 learners, for the most part, acquire the L2 after puberty in a formal context (with an explicit focus), and often perform better in written than in oral language tasks. Although, research has shown that task modality and focus (explicit vs. implicit) affects L2 and heritage learners' linguistic performance (probably because of their context of acquisition), studies in the field of in instructed heritage language acquisition are only starting to examine how these two factor may influence the learning outcomes observed by these two different types of learners. This study examines how the modality and focus of the assessment task may modulate the potential learning gains L2 and heritage learners experience as the result of language instruction.

Changes in language processing and oral proficiency after one semester abroad (Dr. Sara Fernández Cuenca in collaboration with Dr. David Giancaspro, University of Richmond, and Dr. Minerva Rojas, Université Côte d'Azur)

In this project, we examine the effects of study abroad immersion on Spanish learners' grammatical processing as well as on their oral proficiency. We use a self-paced reading paradigm to explore changes in Spanish L2 learners’ grammatical processing of morphosyntactic phenomena, and conduct an oral interview at the beginning and at end of the semester to assess changes in fluency, grammatical accuracy, and lexical diversity. We also investigate if potential changes in processing and oral proficiency interact with the learners’ initial overall proficiency and the degree of immersion that learners self-report throughout the semester.