Research Summary
My research focuses on acoustic & accommodation analyses of socio-phonetic variation based on gender, class and age differences. I study speaker-audience interactions as a motivation for variation. My research investigates the interfaces of language and identity as construed by gender, class, and ethnicity. My dissertation was on Chilean Spanish using digital media. Currently I am working on projects with Japanese-Spanish bilinguals and Hispanic hard-of-hearing children. I like variety!
Education
- PhD, Hispanic Linguistics, Indiana University. Project: Dissertation: A socio-phonetic examination of co-articulation in Chilean public speech.
Biography
I am a socio-phonetician and Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the
department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah. My research
focuses on sound changes that are motivated by social factors. My work brings
together detailed acoustic analysis, variationist sociolinguistics, and speech
accommodation methods, all supported by statistical analyses. The combination of
methods that I employ allow me to propose reasons for socio-phonetic variation
that consider several motivating factors, including phonetic environment, speaker &
listener traits, type and origin of discourse, and lexical frequency of spoken words.
See my research page (https://faculty.utah.edu/u0985432-
TANYA_L._FLORES/bibliography/index.hml) for a complete list of publications from
previous studies.
Currently, my research focuses on: (1) Japanese-Spanish bilinguals and (2) Hispanic
hard-of-hearing children.
Please visit this page to download a free copy of the Spanish language handbook
for parents of children with hearing loss (Manual para familias de niños
con pérdida de audición)
https://languages.utah.edu/_resources/documents/_faculty-resources/parenthandbook.