Faculty Research Fellow
Laura Colantoni (Ph.D. 2001, University of Minnesota) researches sound change, categorization and the bilingual acquisition of variable phonetic parameters. She co-authored Second Language speech: An Introduction and two edited volumes on laboratory phonology and Argentine Spanish, in addition to over 70 refereed articles and book chapters. Her ongoing SSHRC-funded collaborative project focuses on the impact of phonetic variability on the acquisition of grammatical properties in Spanish- English bilinguals. She is also collaborating on an electropalatographic study of crosslinguistic assimilatory patterns and on an investigation on the semantics and audiovisual prosody of biased questions.
Fellowship Research Project: Mixed Worlds: Linguistic Outcomes of Spanish Colonialism
This project focuses on the largest unsupervised experiment of cultural and linguistic contact in history: the Spanish conquest of America, with the goal of exploring two questions: What strategies do speakers use in contact situations involving unrelated languages and mutually unknown cultures? How did contact evolve from the first bilinguals to the development of new linguistic varieties? To answer these questions, I will study primary sources representing different stages in the contact history, which will be analyzed with theoretical frameworks from experimental linguistics, including theories of cross-linguistic influence, second language acquisition and the role of gestures and prosody in communication.