I teach Spanish language, culture, and linguistics courses, and I am also the coordinator of the first three semesters of Spanish language instruction. As a researcher, my areas of expertise include Spanish phonetics, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and second language processing. I am interested in how extralinguistic characteristics, such as the social networks we participate in, our exposure to other languages or dialects, our feelings, or the context in which we communicate, influence the way we speak our first and/or second languages, and the way we think about the language(s) spoken in our communities. Currently, I am working on how multilingual individuals organize their phonetic system(s) and on how our multiple languages can influence one another.
