About

Miquel Simonet is a Professor of Spanish Language and Linguistics at the University of Arizona. He is a phonetician and phonologist working within the tradition of Laboratory Phonology, employing instrumental phonetics and experimental psycholinguistics to investigate phonological knowledge, mental representations of sounds, and sound patterns. His research focuses on the phonetics-phonology interface, phonetic and phonological variation and change, and the effects of bilingualism, second language learning, and societal language contact on phonetic behavior and phonological knowledge. Dr. Simonet has published in numerous scholarly journals and has served as Associate Editor for the Journal of Phonetics and Applied Psycholinguistics. He is actively involved in editorial boards of several journals and has held leadership roles within his department, including Director of Graduate Studies and main graduate advisor for students in Hispanic Linguistics. He has chaired or co-chaired multiple PhD dissertations and serves on dissertation committees at various institutions. His academic background includes a PhD in Romance Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, obtained in 2008. Since arriving at the University of Arizona as an Assistant Professor, he has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2015 and to Professor in 2023. His research and teaching interests include phonetic and phonological variation, laboratory phonology, and bilingual phonetic and phonological processing.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Geography
• Philosophy
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• External Vowel Sandhi in Castilian Spanish: An Acoustic Study of Vowel Sequences Across Word Junctures

  Language and Speech · 2026-03-03

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In Spanish, words may begin or end with a vowel, creating a scenario where two vowels meet across a word juncture, such as in mon o e nano “dwarf monkey.” Vowel sequences of this sort are said to be affected by a post-lexical process of hiatus resolution in which one of the two vowels becomes a glide. This study explores the acoustic–phonetic characteristics of vowel sequences across word junctures in Castilian Spanish. We focus on vowel sequences with no high vocoids: /ea ae eo oe/. Production data were collected from a sample of 23 speakers, and acoustic analyses focused on duration and the shape of first ( F 1) and second formant ( F 2) tracks. Our findings suggest that cross-lexical vowel sequences are resolved via a phonetic coalescence process that retains some of the linearity in (or recoverability of) the underlying sequence, displaying both some diphthongal qualities and some blending qualities. We find no obvious evidence of a “dominant” (syllabic) vowel in the sequence, casting doubt on impressionistic transcription-based descriptions postulating a strict dichotomy between syllabic vowels and glides in post-lexical syllable contraction. We discuss alternative accounts of the resolution of Castilian Spanish vowel sequences across word junctures couched within the framework of Articulatory Phonology, and we argue that post-lexical hiatus resolution is not a phonologized process in this language variety.

  PublisherDOI

• Using offline methods to probe the bi/multilingual acquisition of phonological and phonetic domains

  Research methods in applied linguistics · 2026-03-26

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter summarizes the methods generally employed to characterize the phonetic behavior — including pronunciation (production) and listening (perception) — and underlying phonological representations of bilingual and learner populations. The chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section focuses on speech production, with especial emphasis on laboratory tasks, such as the reading aloud and delayed imitation tasks. The section explains how production data are gathered and then coded and analyzed. The second section revolves around speech perception, with special emphasis on phonetic categorization and discrimination. The section outlines the basic aspects of perception experiments, the nature of the data they produce, and the cognitive processes they are hypothesized to tap into. The third, and last, section focuses on phonological representations, with special emphasis on the probing of the phonological representations of words. The experimental paradigms discussed in the section include lexical decision, auditory and cross-modal priming, and novel word learning. The section explains the basics of such experimental designs as well as the nature of the data they produce. The chapter argues that researchers benefit from incorporating a variety of methods into their phonetic and phonological research.

  PublisherDOI

• Velar palatalization, phonologization, and sound change – A comparative acoustic study of /k/-fronting in Majorcan Catalan

  Journal of Phonetics · 2025-07-15 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Phonetic variants of Majorcan Catalan /ʒ/: A controlled study in societal language contact

  Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca Julio de Urquijo · 2025-01-29

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Some Majorcan Catalan speakers produce /ʒ/ as [j] rather than [ʒ]. We hypothesize that variation in the production of /ʒ/ is modulated by whether speakers are dominant speakers of Catalan or not. Majorcan Catalan exists in a contact situation with Spanish, and Catalan-Spanish bilinguals vary, on a spectrum, in terms of their language dominance. We recruited 18 bilinguals and divided them into two groups: Catalan- or Spanish-dominant. The participants repeated out loud auditory stimuli in which /ʒ/ had been produced by model talkers as either [j] or [ʒ]. The results revealed systematic differences between Catalan- and Spanish-dominant bilinguals in terms of two correlates that capture the distinction between [j] and [ʒ]: spectral center of gravity and skewness. While the effects of the subjects’ profile were of a very large magnitude, the effects of imitation—having heard [j] or [ʒ] as the auditory model for /ʒ/—were negligible. This suggests that, in Majorcan Catalan, individual phonological (internalized) representations of /ʒ/, and not only production habits, are modulated by the speaker’s background—some speakers have /j/ and others have /ʒ/.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Perceptual Sensitivity to Stress in Native English Speakers Learning Spanish as a Second Language

  Laboratory Phonology Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology · 2022-11-02 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Second language (L2) learners of Spanish whose first language (L1) is English tend to find Spanish lexical stress patterns difficult to acquire. This study investigates whether such difficulty derives, at least in part, from an obstacle encountered during perceptual processing: reduced perceptual sensitivity to stress distinctions. Participants were adult L1 English L2 Spanish learners of various proficiency levels. The experiment was a categorical matching task with triads of auditory stimuli minimally contrasting in stress (target) or segmental composition (baseline), an ABX task. The results show that learners were more accurate in the baseline condition than in the target condition, suggesting reduced perceptual sensitivity to stress relative to other contrasts. The reduction in accuracy, however, was restricted to trials in which matching items were not adjacent, further suggesting an obstacle with phonological processing in working memory rather than perceptual categorization. The default stress processing routines of L1 English L2 Spanish learners, optimized for their L1 (not their L2), may be responsible for the acquisitional obstacles with this feature of the Spanish language.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Foreign-Language Phonetic Development Leads to First-Language Phonetic Drift: Plosive Consonants in Native Portuguese Speakers Learning English as a Foreign Language in Brazil

  Languages · 2021 · 13 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  • Philosophy

  Fifty-six Portuguese speakers born and raised in Brazil produced Portuguese words beginning in one of four plosives, /p b k ɡ/. Twenty-eight of them were monolinguals (controls), and the rest were learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The learners were also asked to produce English words beginning with one of four plosives, /p b k ɡ/. We measured the plosives’ voice onset times (VOT) to address the following research questions: Do foreign-language learners, whose exposure to native English oral input is necessarily limited, form new sound categories specific to their additional language? Does engaging in the learning of a foreign language affect the phonetics of one’s native language? The EFL learners were found to differ from the controls in their production of Portuguese voiced (but not voiceless) plosives—prevoicing was longer in learner speech. The learners displayed different VOT targets for voiced (but not voiceless) consonants as a function of the language they were speaking—prevoicing was longer in Portuguese. In EFL learners’ productions, English sounds appear to be fundamentally modeled on phonologically similar native sounds, but some phonetic development (or reorganization) is found. Phonetic development induced by foreign-language learning may lead to a minor reconfiguration of the phonetics of native language sounds. EFL learners may find it challenging to learn the pronunciation patterns of English, likely due to the reduced access to native oral input.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSING OF STRESS BY NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKERS LEARNING SPANISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

  Studies in Second Language Acquisition · 2021 · 12 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive psychology

  Abstract One feature of Spanish that presents some difficulties to second language (L2) learners whose first language (L1) is English concerns lexical stress. This study explores one aspect of the obstacle these learners face, weak phonological processing routines concerning stress inherited from their native language. Participants were L1 English L2 learners of Spanish. The experiment was a sequence-recall task with auditory stimuli minimally contrasting in stress (target) or segmental composition (baseline). The results suggest that learners are more likely to accurately recall sequences with stimuli contrasting in segmental composition than stress, suggesting reduced phonological processing of stress relative to a processing baseline. Furthermore, an increase in proficiency—assessed by means of grammatical and lexical tests—was found to be modestly associated with an increase in the accuracy of processing stress. We conclude that the processing routines of native English speakers lead to an acquisitional obstacle when learning Spanish as a L2.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• APS volume 41 issue 4 Cover and Front matter

  Applied Psycholinguistics · 2020-07-01

  articleOpen access

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Perception of Postalveolar English Obstruents by Spanish Speakers Learning English as a Foreign Language in Mexico

  Languages · 2020 · 6 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Artificial Intelligence

  The present study deals with the perception (identification and discrimination) of an English phonemic contrast (/t∫/–/∫/, as in cheat and sheet) by speakers of two Mexican varieties of Spanish who are learning English as a foreign language. Unlike English, Spanish does not contrast /t∫/ and /∫/ phonemically. Most Spanish varieties have [t∫], but not [∫]. In northwestern Mexico, [∫] and [t∫] find themselves in a situation of “free” variation—perhaps conditioned, to some extent, by social factors, but not in complementary distribution. In this variety, [∫] and [t∫] are variants of the same phoneme. The present study compares the perceptual behavior of English learners from northwestern Mexico, with that of learners from central Mexico, whose native dialect includes only [t∫]. The results of a word-categorization task show that both groups of learners find cheat and sheet difficult to identify in the context of each other, but that, relative to the other learner group, the group of learners in northwestern Mexico find this task to be particularly challenging. The results of a categorical discrimination task show that both learner groups find the members of the /t∫/–/∫/ contrast difficult to discriminate. On average, accuracy is lower for the group of learners in northwestern Mexico than it is for the central Mexicans. The findings suggest that the phonetic variants found in one’s native dialect modulate the perception of nonnative sounds and, consequently, that people who speak different regional varieties of the same language may face different obstacles when learning the sounds of their second language.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• APS volume 41 issue 5 Cover and Front matter

  Applied Psycholinguistics · 2020-09-01

  articleOpen access

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Flavia Adani

  Freie Universität Berlin

  224 shared

• Rachel Hayes‐Harb

  University of Utah

  222 shared

• Annie Tremblay

  Lallemand (Canada)

  215 shared

• Patrick Proctor

  215 shared

• Shelley Tong

  University of Arizona

  134 shared

• Martha Crago

  98 shared

• Carla Contemori

  The University of Texas at El Paso

  96 shared

• Seth Wiener

  96 shared

Education

• PhD in Spanish (Romance Linguistics), Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  2008

• MA in Spanish (Hispanic Linguistics), Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  2003

• Llicenciatura en Filologia Catalana, Filologia Catalana i Lingüística General

  Universitat de les Illes Balears

  2000