Rajiv Rao

About

Rajiv Rao is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Director of the Language Sciences Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research focuses on understanding the factors that influence how we sound when speaking a language, with particular emphasis on Spanish. He investigates aspects of prosody, including intonation, stress, and rhythm, as well as individual sounds, examining their effects on the sound system of Spanish in relation to syllables, words, phrases, pragmatic and syntactic conditions, and social variables. His dissertation concentrated on Peninsular Spanish, and his current research agenda centers on Spanish in the Americas. In addition to his research, Rao integrates his interests into teaching courses on general Spanish linguistics and Spanish phonetics and phonology at both graduate and undergraduate levels. His academic interests encompass Phonetics, Phonology, Prosody, Heritage Languages, Afro-Hispanic Linguistics, and Second Language Acquisition. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Davis, and is actively involved in advancing understanding of Spanish language variation and phonetic phenomena.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Political Science
• Natural Language Processing
• History
• Philosophy
• Pedagogy
• Social psychology
• Communication

Selected publications

• La fonética y fonología del español como lengua de herencia

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  La investigación del sistema fonético y fonológico de los hablantes de herencia del español ha crecido durante la última década. Durante los últimos cinco años en particular, se ha aumentado notablemente la cantidad de publicaciones y presentaciones en conferencias que emplean el análisis acústico y aproximaciones cuantitativas para analizar datos segmentales y suprasegmentales. El presente capítulo ofrece una vista panorámica de investigaciones hasta la fecha sobre el español como lengua de her…

  PublisherDOI

• Intonational variation in third party complaints in Spanish

  Journal of Speech Sciences · 2021 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Very little previous research has addressed the prosodic characteristics of third party complaints. This paper discusses an utterance and word level intonational analysis of this speech act in four speakers of Mexican Spanish. The effect of social distance/ power relationships was incorporated into the study by creating an experimental data elicitation task in which participants addressed identical complaints to a friend, as well as a boss, based on a series of hypothetical contexts. Major globa…

  DOI

• The Sound Pattern of Heritage Spanish: An Exploratory Study on the Effects of a Classroom Experience

  Languages · 2020 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  While heritage Spanish phonetics and phonology and classroom experiences have received increased attention in recent years, these areas have yet to converge. Furthermore, most research in these realms is cross-sectional, ignoring individual or group changes across time. We aim to connect research strands and fill gaps associated with the aforementioned areas by conducting an individual-level empirical analysis of narrative data produced by five female heritage speakers of Spanish at the beginnin…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pronunciaciones del español

  2022-06-07 · 2 citations

  book

  Pronunciaciones del español es una introducción accesible a la fonética y la fonología del español que destaca la diversidad de pronunciaciones empleadas en el mundo hispanohablante. Con explicaciones claras y gráficos detallados, este libro guía al estudiante en el aprendizaje de conceptos claves de fonética articulatoria y acústica. El libro presta especial atención a la variación sociolingüística, a partir de ejemplos que cubren pronunciaciones típicas de variedades estándares y de variedades…

  PublisherDOI

• Afro-Peruvian Spanish declarative intonation

  Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics · 2020 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Abstract This study offers an analysis of Afro-Peruvian Spanish (APS) declarative intonation. Our findings indicate that this dialect presents intonational features that diverge from other varieties of Spanish. It shows minimal downstepping across utterances and a predominant use of the L+H* pitch accent, even in prenuclear position, where L+>H* is more commonly cited in neutral contexts. At intermediate phrase edges, the most common APS boundary tone is L- rather than H-, which is usually em…

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Donald N. Tuten

  16 shared

• Fernando Tejedo‐Herrero

  16 shared

• H. Robyn Clarke

  16 shared

• Sandro Sessarego

  The University of Texas at Austin

  11 shared

• Brianna Butera

  University of Memphis

  5 shared

• Jennifer Ploch

  Mercy Hospital Springfield

  4 shared

• Burke S. Richmond

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  4 shared

• Maichou Lor

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Spanish & Portuguese

  University of California Davis

Similar researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Alex Dresslerh-6
• Karen Britlandh-6
• David Danaherh-4