Scholarship. Miquel Simonet is a laboratory phonologist and experimental phonetician, and a scholar of second language acquisition and bilingualism. As a phonologist, Miquel studies the sound patterns of languages: how they are manifested in production and perception, how they are processed and represented, and how they develop, vary, and change over time. One of Miquel's principal areas of expertise is bilingualism, in particular, the phonetics, phonology, and psycholinguistics of bilingualism and second language acquisition. A secondary area of interest of his is phonological variation and change, including historical phonology. Miquel's interests in the broader field of second language acquisition, including morphological processing and the development of fluency, has been growing in recent years. Miquel's publications have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Phonetics, the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Language and Speech, Second Language Research, the International Journal of Bilingualism, Phonetica, Laboratory Phonology, Linguistics, Probus, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Languages, Hispania, and Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics. See Faculty Profile > Scholarly Contributions for list of publications.
Service. Miquel currently serves as Associate Editor of Applied Psycholinguistics, and is a member of the editorial or advisory boards of Second Language Research and Laboratory Phonology. Miquel is a member of the International Phonetic Association and of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. At the University of Arizona, Miquel currently serves as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Additionally, he is a member of the faculty in the graduate interdisciplinary program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT GIDP), where he chairs the Cognitive Dimensions of SLA track, and the graduate interdisciplinary program in Cognitive Science (CogSci GIDP). Miquel has a courtesy appointment in the Department of Linguistics.
Graduate Advising. Miquel has chaired nine PhD dissertations, and he is currently supervising three more. This has been a very important part of his career, and he is immensely proud of his students, former and current. Nevertheless, Miquel plans to decline chairing any more doctoral dissertation committees, at least for a long time; he feels he must take a break from advising in order to refocus his career and his interests. One of Miquel's goals as a mentor has been 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. 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 adress bigger questions more deeply and thoroughly. This is how most research in the behavioral sciences (including experimental linguistics) is conducted, but this working style is not well regarded in the humanities, which makes its implementation difficult in Miquel's immediate context. The individualistic culture of the humanities is not well suited for experimental, scientific research, and Miquel feels this has resulted in a scattered scholarly profile. To refocus, he must stop, reflect, say no. Perhaps it has to do with midlife crisis.
Background. Miquel graduated with PhD in Romance Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008, where he wrote his dissertation under the guidance of Professor José I. Hualde. Miquel has been at the University of Arizona since 2008 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2015. Miquel was born and raised on the island of Majorca, on the western Mediterranean Sea, and his native language is Catalan.