Tanya Flores

Tanya L. Flores, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics
Department of World Languages and Cultures
Languages and Communication Building
255 S Central Campus Drive RM 1400
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, UT 84112

Regular Courses Current Research Recommended Links

Courses I Teach Regularly

I teach undergraduate and graduate level Spanish Linguistics courses along with a departmental gateway course (LANG/WLC 2020) that introduces majors and minors from all of our language programs to Sociolinguistics. I enjoy all of these courses and love the opportunity to work with students of all levels and language programs. These are descriptions of my regular course offerings with a link to the most recent student evaluations.

WLC 2020 (Formerly LANG 2020): Language in Society
This course serves as an introduction to linguistics, specifically to the study of language within social contexts, for all language majors and minors. For the final project, students learn how to research a sociolinguistics topic. This is a lecture course taught in English.

SPAN 5242: Spanish Phonetics and Pronunciation
This course introduces students to phonetic terminology, frameworks, and to acoustic analysis through laboratory training. This is a required course for our Spanish Teaching majors and an elective option for Spanish undergraduate and graduate students (WLMA and MALP), and Linguistics undergraduate and graduate students. Lecture/Lab course taught in Spanish.

Current Research Projects

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 for a complete list of publications from previous studies.

Japanese-Spanish Bilinguals and Japoñol
This project focuses on the language contact situation of a community of Japanese-Spanish bilinguals living in Spain. The project includes several sociolinguistic and phonetic analyses including an analysis of factors affecting maintenance of Japanese as a minority language, an analysis of code-switching, and a study on declarative intonation in the Spanish of the speakers (Flores 2016; forthcoming). These analyses signal a situation of language shift, though phonetic similarities between Spanish and Japanese make the contact situation unique.

Flores, T & Williams, A. (2019). Japoñol: Spanish-Japanese Code-Switching. Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Papers 19:1.

Flores, T. (2016). Declarative intonation in the Spanish of Japanese-Spanish bilinguals. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics29.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/2.0000533

Flores, T., & Swalberg, A. (2016). Verb-morphology mixing in Japañol. 10th annual Cornell University Linguistics Colloquium. Ithaca, NY. April 18, 2016.

Hispanic deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children
This project examines the speech of a group of Hispanic children in Salt Lake County who use hearing assistive devices. Despite growing research on DHH populations, minimal research attention has been paid to DHH groups from home-language backgrounds other than English. This project proposes to create a speech corpus of 3-8 year old children that will be used to study various stages and aspects of their language development in both Spanish and English. The study connects an interdisciplinary team from the University of Utah (World Languages & Cultures, Linguistics, and Communication Sciences & Disorders) with the USDB and the local community. Results of the study will be used for academic scholarship as well as educational materials for DHH families.

The Parent Handbook in Spanish (“Manual para familias de niños con pérdida de audición") is available by clicking here.