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 former student, now faculty at Southern Illinois University, Dr. Santiago Gualapuro, are pursuing an NSF-funded project that explores pragmatic meaning in bilingual child Spanish/child Imbabura Kichwa-speaking children in Ecuador. The project contributes to language preservation and revitalization by documenting the language with the CHILDES Database, creating bilingual story books and studying bilingual implicature interpretations. Dr. Jasso investigates theoretical and clinical questions concerning language input and language learning in heritage bilingual contexts. His research includes typically developing bilingual children and adolescents, as well as those with developmental language disorder (DLD). He is particularly interested in the comprehension and production of complex syntactic structures, using both experimental and naturalistic approaches. Building on NSF-funded research, a current project conducted in partnership with local libraries examines how language input within bilingual caregiver–child dyads shapes language development. Dr. Stigliano conducts experimental research aimed at informing syntactic theory. Using large-scale acceptability judgment experiments, she examines how speakers of Spanish judge complex structures, including island configurations and multiple wh-questions. In collaboration with Dr. Grinstead, she is also investigating adult second-language learners of Spanish, with the goal of understanding how verbal ellipsis relates to other properties of the grammar and what this reveals about second-language acquisition. Dr. Nibert continues her work on L2 phonology, including L2 vowel quality.

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.