Projects

Current Projects
Publications and Presentations

Spanish in Central New Jersey
This project focuses on the Spanish spoken in New Jersey, in particular, in the greater New Brunswick area, with the aim of documenting its linguistic features and investigating language variation and change in this area. The outcome of this project will be the creation of a corpus of the Spanish language as currently used in central New Jersey.

Language Change and Variation

Morphosyntax Variation in Spanish-English Bilinguals
This project explores the variation of forms in the expression of perfective past time reference, and futurity among early Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States. In addition, it compares the results from bilinguals to those of Spanish monolinguals in order to examine the potential role of bilingualism and language contact situations. Data are currently being collected using different sociolinguistic corpora and a variety of experimental tasks that target both production and receptive knowledge, and will be analyzed following Bayesian regression methods. The findings from this project will inform theories of grammaticalization, language change and variation, bilingualism, and heritage language acquisition, as well as educational programs.

Morphosyntactic Variation in Spanish and Portuguese Monolinguals.
Several projects, in various stages of development, are dedicated to exploring morphosyntactic variation in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, relying on data from both production and perception. The projects rely on a usage-based variationist sociolinguistic approach, employing quantitative methods to examine how linguistic patterns emerge from the intersection of actual language use, social characteristics, and cognitive processes. Such projects include experimental investigation of predicative possessive prefers in Brazilian Portuguese and Argentinian Spanish, experimental investigation of constraints on anaphoric direct object expression in European and Brazilian Portuguese, experimental and corpus-based analysis of variable past participles in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, experimental and corpus-based analysis of third-person singular indirect objects in Spanish, among others. The findings of these projects contribute to theories of language variation and change, cognitive and usage-based grammar, and more.

Language Attitudes and Ideologies

Influence of Political Orientation on Language Attitudes
This project examines the language attitudes of Palma’s population toward the two official languages of the Balearic Islands, Catalan and Spanish, as well as their daily use of both languages. The overarching goal is to identify the factors associated with these attitudes and usage patterns through both quantitative and qualitative analysis. By exploring these connections, we aim to uncover the interplay between language attitudes, language use, and language policy, providing insights to inform language and education policy.

Spanish in the Puerto Rican Diaspora
This project explores the sociocultural and linguistic experiences of Puerto Ricans in New Jersey, focusing on how they linguistically accommodate —or choose not to— dominant social groups. Specifically, it examines how Puerto Ricans may adjust their use of lambdacism, /s/ aspiration, and post-tonic intervocalic /d/ elision in interactions with other Spanish speakers. Through a combination of quantitative (acoustic analysis) and qualitative (narrative interviews) methods, the study assesses the extent of accommodation, the strategies used, and the influence of factors, such as age and gender, on the realization of these linguistic features. Ultimately, the project seeks to shed light on how language use and identity negotiation intersect with social dynamics among Puerto Ricans in New Jersey.

Selected Publications
Feliu-Ribas, M. (in preparation). Variation in Perfective Past Time Reference: Insights from Spanish in Contact with English.

Feliu-Ribas, M. (under review). “Cateto tú… que no’ntiendê l’andalûh”: Attitudes towards a framework for the spelling of Andalusian Spanish.

Barba Blanco, Y. (in preparation) Cuir Voices: Style-Shifting and Identity Negotiation Among Spanish Heritage Speakers

Barba Blanco, Y. (in preparation) Spanish in the Puerto Rican Diaspora.

López Durand, E., and Dickinson, K. (2025). Inclusive Morphology in Spanish: Processing and Learnability. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 18(2), pp. 391-424.

Dickinson, K., Lamberti, L., and Schwenter, S. (forthcoming). Evaluating the form of third-person anaphoric direct objects in Portuguese: A cross-dialectal study. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics.

Jaume-Losa, A. (2025). “From Left to Right”: the Influence of Political Orientation on the Language Attitudes of the Population of Palma de Mallorca toward Catalan and Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 18(1), pp. 131-166.

Dickinson, K. (2024). Regularization and innovation: A usage-based approach to past participle variation in Brazilian Portuguese. Languages, 9(2), 52.

Barba Blanco, Y. (2024). Procesos de acomodación lingüística dentro de la diáspora puertorriqueña en Nueva Jersey. Revista Nebrija De Lingüística Aplicada a La Enseñanza De Lenguas, 18(37), 68–94. https://doi.org/10.26378/rnlael1837587.

Dickinson, K. (2023). What Does It Meme? English–Spanish Codeswitching and Enregisterment in Virtual Social Space. Languages, 8(4), 231.

Selected Presentations and Talks
Feliu-Ribas, M. (April 2025). Time, Tense, and Variation: The Acquisition of the Past Perfective Forms by Early Spanish-English Bilinguals. NYU Sociolinguistics Lab, NY.

Barba Blanco, Y. (February, 2025). Cuir Voices: Style-Shifting and Identity Negotiation Among Spanish Heritage Speakers. Research Colloquium. Rutgers University, NJ.

Feliu Ribas, M. (November 2024). Bailé or he bailado? Variable Perfective Past Time Reference among Spanish-English Early Bilinguals. New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 52. Miami Beach, MI.

Dickinson, K., Lamberti, L., and Scott, S. (November 2024). Evaluating variable third-person anaphoric direct objects in Portuguese: A cross-dialectal study. New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 52. Miami Beach, MI.

Dickinson, K. (November 2024). Sociocognitive representations of variable Spanish past participles. New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 52. Miami Beach, MI.

Barba Blanco, Y. (November 2024). About the role of raciolinguistics in Spanish language teaching. 3rd Colloquium of Global Trends in Language Teaching: Meaningful Experiences in Language Teaching and Learning. Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia (UNAD) and Escuela de Ciencias de la Educación (ECEDU), Colombia.

Jaume-Losa, A. (October 2024). “From Left to Right”: the Influence of Political Orientation on the Language Attitudes of the Population of Palma de Mallorca toward Catalan and Spanish. Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Omaha, NE.

Barba Blanco, Y. (October 2024). Assimilation Processes within the Puerto Rican Diaspora. Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Omaha, NE.

Fuchs, M., Dickinson, K., and Schwenter, S. (May 2024). Predicative possession choice in Argentinean Spanish: An experimental study. 54th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Provo, UT.

Feliu Ribas, M. (April 2024). “Cateto tú… que no’ntiendê l’andalûh”: Attitudes towards a framework for the spelling of Andalusian Spanish. 11th International Workshop in Spanish Sociolinguistics, Buffalo, NY.

Dickinson, K., Schwenter, S., and McLean, C. (April 2024). Speaker Evaluations of Indirect Object (Non-)Doubling in Spanish: An Experimental Approach. 11th International Workshop in Spanish Sociolinguistics, Buffalo, NY.