"The temptation to form premature theories upon insuficient data is the bane of our profession." Sherlock Holmes in The Valley of Fear, Arthur C. Doyle.
Scholarship. Miquel Simonet is an experimental phonologist. Experimental phonologists employ the auxiliary theories and methods of instrumental phonetics and experimental psycholinguistics to investigate phonological competence and processing. Miquel's principal area of expertise is phonological variation and change, with a focus on Iberian Romance. A second area of expertise is second-language phonological competence: the production, perception, and processing of the sounds and (the phonological structure of) words of a second language. 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 and Google Scholar for approximate citation impact.
Service. Miquel 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 doctoral track. Starting in 2021, he serves as the COH IRB Liaison, which means that, among other things, he leads the scholarly review process in COH. Miquel is a member of the graduate faculty of the Department of Linguistics. In terms of service to the profession, Miquel currently serves as Associate Editor of Applied Psycholinguistics (2018-2021), and is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Second Language Research and Laboratory Phonology. Miquel is a member of the International Phonetic Association and of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
Graduate Advising. 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 on their own (personal) projects. 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 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. Traditionally, the empirical humanities value intellectual modesty, thoroughness, and objective verification. 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 phonological variation and change in Iberian Romance or on second language phonetics and phonological processing. Miquel 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). Miquel will only onsider advising PhD students who have taken two graduate classes and an independent study with him by the time they take the PhD Comprehensive Exams, a total of 9 credits.
Vita. Miquel graduated with a PhD in Spanish, with a designated emphasis 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. His interests include literature and nature.