Scholarship. Miquel Simonet is a phonetician, laboratory phonologist, and scholar of second language studies. Laboratory phonologists employ the auxiliary theories and methods of instrumental phonetics and experimental psycholinguistics to investigate phonological competence. One of Miquel's principal areas of expertise is second language speech learning, particularly the acquisition of the sounds and (the phonological structure of) words of a second language. A secondary area of interest of his is phonetic and phonological variation and change, including contact-induced change, with a focus on Western Romance. His interest in second language learning (beyond phonetics) 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 a 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 is currently supervising three more. One of Miquel's 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. 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. Miquel has not necessarily succeeded in instilling this culture in his immediate context, as it seems to be a struggle to find a place for collaborative empiricism in the humanities. Miquel will continue to invite his students to consider his philosophy, but he is aware that not all will embrace it. Miquel welcomes inquiries from prospective students who would like to write their doctoral dissertation on second language phonetics and psycholinguistics or phonological variation and change in Ibero-Romance. Miquel can supervise student researchers in both the PhD Program in Hispanic Linguistics and the PhD Program in SLAT.
Vita. Miquel graduated with a PhD in Romance Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2008), where he wrote his dissertation as an advisee 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. He was born and raised on the island of Majorca, on the western Mediterranean Sea, and his native language is Catalan.