Graduate Hispanic Linguistics
The Ohio State University offers one of the most distinguished and comprehensive Graduate Hispanic Linguistics programs in the nation. As one of the largest research universities in the nation, OSU houses vast resources to support research in Hispanic Linguistics from distinct perspectives. More specifically, our department collaborates with the Departments of Comparative Studies, Linguistics, Psychology, Speech & Hearing Sciences, as well as the Center for Cognitive Sciences, The Center for Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and The College of Education. Students and faculty enjoy the benefits of the OSU library services and state of the art research and instructional facilities.
OSU's rich academic environment offers a unique opportunity for students to receive comprehensive preparation as Hispanic Linguistics scholars and professionals in the growing field of Hispanic Linguistics. We invite you to explore our expertise and to contact us to help you pursue your academic interests in Hispanic Linguistics.
Research Areas
Our faculty have many overlapping areas of research and are by no means limited to the following concentrations. However, the following descriptions give an idea of how our collaborative and individual work has developed thus far. Please refer to individual faculty web pages for further detail and links to papers.
Dr. Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza works on phonetics and phonology, both from a theoretical and an experimental perspective. She is interested in how phonetic data can help us develop theoretical models to explain sound patterns. In addition, she is interested in second language acquisition of phonology, with a focus on new methodologies and instructional implications. She leads the collaborative project, Our Voices/Nuestras Voces, that explores the acquisition of Spanish sounds.Her mentoring experience has also allowed her to develop expertise in sociophonetics, especially on how phonetic analysis and understanding can shed light on phonetic variation and vice versa. She supervises the Speech Analysis Lab where SPPO members with similar research interests can work on their projects. Dr. Holly Nibert’s research interests fall within phonology and phonetics, and the acquisition of a second-language (L2) sound system. She has numerous publications on Spanish intonation, including its acquisition by L2 learners with English as an L1. Her most current work focuses on the L2 acquisition of Spanish segments (including both vowels and consonants). She and Dr. Grinstead co-supervise the SPPO Language Acquisition Lab, which has a sound booth for use by faculty and graduate students."
In this area, Dr. Grinstead and lab participants, are pursuing an NSF-funded project looking at the development of pragmatic implicatures in child Spanish-speakers, in particular, those identified with the developmental language disorder known as specific language impairment (SLI). Other work in the lab looks at literacy outcomes for Spanish-speaking children diagnosed with SLI, through our collaborations with the Department of Speech & Hearing Science, and at neurocognitive measures of syntactic development, in conjunction with the Neuroscience Project at FES-Iztacala, of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In parallel, Dr. Nibert continues her work on L2 phonology, focusing on L2 vowel quality especially, which includes her collaboration with recent PhD students at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Dr. Laura Stigliano specializes in syntax and its interfaces, encompassing both theoretical and experimental approaches. As a syntactician, she aims to understand the principles governing the structure of natural language and its interaction with other grammar components, such as morphology and semantics. She’s interested in a diverse array of phenomena, including ellipsis, islands, resumption, and quantification. While her primary emphasis is on Spanish, her investigations also extend to languages like Galician and Hungarian.
In this area, Dr. Anna Babel specializes in sociolinguistics, language contact, and linguistic anthropology. Much of her research, including her ethnography Between the Andes and the Amazon, has drawn on qualitative and qualitative data from the Quechua-Spanish contact region of central Bolivia. She is also centrally interested in the effects of awareness on language, and on the extent to which people are able to control sociolinguistic variables in their speech. She is in the process of initiating a research project on mobility, in particular the transatlantic migration of Bolivians to Barcelona, Spain. Encompassing language contact, migration, and political activism, her teaching and service center on the political and social dimensions of Latinx languages and communities in the US. She serves as the faculty sponsor for the Sociolinguistics Lab at The Ohio State University, which is available to graduate students and faculty conducting research in the field of sociolinguistics. Dr. Scott Schwenter is a specialist in morphosyntactic variation and pragmatics, specializing in Portuguese, Spanish and the comparative analysis of these and other Romance languages. He is currently writing a comparative grammar of Portuguese and Spanish (under contract with Routledge) and contributing chapters on “Null Objects in the Romance Languages” and “Morphosyntactic Variation and Change in Brazilian Portuguese” to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. His recent publications have appeared in Language Variation and Change, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, and Journal of Pragmatics. Meanwhile, along with Faculty Emeritus Dr. Terrell Morgan, Dr. Scott Schwenter has been investigating plural forms of address in Castilian, (Brazilian and European) Portuguese, Catalan, and Galician, in which pronouns such as ustedes, os senhores, and vostés are no longer productive for many speakers.
Dr. Holly Nibert is the Director of the Spanish and Portuguese Language Programs, and she is interested in the principles and practices of L2 classroom instruction, instructor training, and language program direction. She is co-author of two Spanish language textbooks published by Pearson, including the beginner-level title ¡Arriba! Comunicación y cultura, since its fifth edition in 2008, and the new intermediate-level title Día a día, in its first edition in 2015.