"The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession." Sherlock Holmes in The Valley of Fear, Arthur C. Doyle.
Research & Scholarship. I consider myself an experimental, laboratory phonologist. Experimental phonologists employ the auxiliary theories and methods of instrumental phonetics and experimental psycholinguistics to investigate phonological knowledge, the mental representation of sounds and sound patterns. Within laboratory phonology, my main area of expertise comprises bilingual and second-language phonological competence, which I study by analyzing the production, perception, and processing of the sounds and (the phonological structure of) words in (emergent) bilinguals. A second area of expertise of mine is phonetic and phonological variation and change, with a focus on Iberian Romance (in particular, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese). My publications have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Phonetics, the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Language and Speech, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Second Language Research, the International Journal of Bilingualism, Phonetica, Laboratory Phonology, Linguistics, Probus, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, and Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics. See Faculty Profile > Scholarly Contributions for a list of publications and Google Scholar for approximate citation impact.
Professional Service. I currently serve as Associate Editor of Journal of Phonetics (2022-2025) and used to serve as Associate Editor of Applied Psycholinguistics (2018-2021). I am on the editorial boards of the journals Second Language Research, Applied Psycholinguistics, and Laboratory Phonology. Between January 2019 and July 2022, I was Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish & Portuguese, and I served as main graduate advisor for students in Hispanic Linguistics for one additional year. Between 2018 and 2023, I chaired the Cognitive Dimensions concentration in the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) interdepartmental doctoral program and served on the Executive Committee of SLAT. Since August 2021, I serve as the COH IRB Liaison, which means that, among other things, I lead the scholarly review process in COH; I support my colleagues in COH regarding the IRB process. I am also member of the graduate faculty in the Department of Linguistics, where I hold a courtesy appointment.
Graduate Advising & Mentoring. One of my main goals as a mentor is to help create a collaborative, lab-centered culture in which experimental research is conducted by a small team of researchers rather than by individuals working alone on their own (personal) projects and pursuing only their own interests. In a laboratory, team members work on subprojects, closely connected to each others', under an umbrella project. In this way, the team is able to address bigger questions more deeply and thoroughly. It is not easy to find a place for collaborative empiricism in the modern humanities, which tend to value philosophical trendiness and individualism. The empirical humanities value intellectual modesty, thoroughness, and objective, empirical verification, an approach it shares with the behavioral (and some of the social) sciences. I continue to invite my students to consider my approach to conducting research. I welcome inquiries from prospective students who would like to write their doctoral dissertation on phonological variation and change in Iberian Romance, Ibero-Romance laboratory phonology, or second language phonetics and phonological processing. I can supervise student researchers in both the PhD Program in Hispanic Linguistics (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese) and the PhD Program in SLAT (Graduate College GIDP). I will only consider advising dissertators who, by the time they advance to candidacy, have taken at least two graduate courses with me (SPAN 583A, and SPAN 583C or SPAN 599). Ideally, they would have also taken at least one graduate course in statistics (e.g., LING 507) and phonetics/phonology or psycholinguistics courses in the Department of Linguistics (e.g., LING 515). My advisees are asked to join the Arizona Applied Phonetics and Psycholinguistics Lab (AAPPL), which meets weekly.
Vita. I graduated with a PhD in Romance Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2008). My doctoral advisor was José I. Hualde. The other members of my dissertation committee were Jennifer Cole, Ana M. Escobar, and Zsuzsanna Fagyal. I have been at the University of Arizona since 2008, was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure in 2015, and to (full) Professor in 2023. I was born and raised on the island of Majorca, on the western Mediterranean, and my native language is (Majorcan) Catalan. My personal interests include literature (both fiction and creative nonfiction) and landscapes (contemplating and photographing them).