My research program is a fitting illustration of my academic career to date, as they are both characterized by their variety and dynamism. Being a phonetician by training, a large portion of my work is concerned with speech in different ways. Due to my early and continued interest in second language (L2) acquisition, my main area of specialization since I started my PhD has been that of L2 phonetics/phonology, although some of my lines of inquiry also address questions concerning native (L1) speech perception and production. More recently, I have also incorporated L1 and L2 (morpho)syntactic learning, and in particular its interaction with other cognitive capabilities, to my list. Below you will find a summary of the topics that I have covered in some of my recent publications as well as in work that is now in progress. 

 

The interplay between L2 phonological development and vocabulary acquisition in second language learning

This research line is devoted to studying how the existence of difficult non-native phonological contrasts (e.g., English /i/-/ɪ/ for native speakers of Spanish) shapes the establishment and retrieval of (phono)lexical representations of L2 words. My work on this topic, which includes all of my doctoral research, can be split into two main sub-lines. First, in a series of studies, I have been examining which cues favor the encoding of a distinction between the difficult L2 phones in similar-sounding words in real time by means of auditory novel word learning paradigms. Secondly, I am also investigating how both speaker-specific (e.g., perceptual acuity, vocabulary size) and word-specific factors (e.g., lexical frequency, phonological neighborhood density) modulate learners’ ability to establish accurate L2 (phono)lexical representations.

Representative publications:

 

The effects of phonetic variability on L1 and L2 perception and spoken word recognition

Within this strand, my collaborators and I investigate how exposure to different phonetic variants for the same word due to regional (e.g., Central Catalan: f[u]rat vs. Majorcan Catalan: f[o]rat, ‘hole’) or even idiosyncratic variation affects speech perception and lexical access for native and non-native speakers. Here I have assessed to what extent listeners’ actual experience with dialectal forms, as well as differences in how canonical the different variants are, modulate the efficiency of lexical access not only in the native language, but also in a second language, where the characteristics of the L1 phonological inventory are also expected to play a role. 

Representative publications:

 

Perceptual flexibility in L1 and L2: friend or foe?

This line of research is concerned with the question of how flexible and adaptable phonetic categories are in speech perception and, most importantly, of whether such flexibility may lead to different outcomes in native and non-native languages. To look into these issues, we focus on the study of low-level perceptual phenomena like selective adaptation, as well as higher-level statistically-guided and lexically-guided phonetic recalibration of native and non-native perceptual categories.

Representative publications:

 

Cognitive predictors of L1 ultimate attainment and L2 proficiency 

Most of the research in this line stems from my previous postdoctoral position at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg as part of the project “Individual differences in language acquisition and attainment”. We mainly focused on the acquisition of specific grammatical structures by native and non-native speakers and assessed the relationships between linguistic outcomes and cognitive predictors such as declarative and procedural memory, crystallized and fluid IQ, and metalinguistic awareness. This research combines assessments of grammatical competence in real languages (e.g., English, Spanish, Greek) for a range of populations that includes monolingual speakers, heritage speakers, late L2 learners and native semi-literate and late-literate speakers, with gamified artificial language learning paradigms targeting the acquisition of word order and case marking restrictions in novel miniature languages. Even though I am no longer at FAU, I am currently involved in their DFG-funded Research Training Group “Dimensions of Constructional Space”, where I am leading a project examining the interplay between frequency and semantic transparency effects on morphosyntactic learning.

Representative publications: