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Research

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Spanish in Boston Project 

I am a Grad Assistant for Dr. Danny Erker in the Spanish in Boston Project. My work revolves around transcribing sociolinguistics interviews and annotating, extracting, and cleaning data related to various social and linguistic phenomena.

Logo (and link) of the SULa Lab, which stands for Stuctures of Under-researched Languages Lab. The logo is the acronym SULa with green palms steming out of the U and the L

I was a Grad Assistant for Dr. Neil Myler's Mirror Principle Violations Project. My work involved surveying existing descriptive materials on a wide range of languages in order to describe the interactions between causative and applicative morphemes. 

The Role of Salience in Linguistic Contact: A Sociolinguistic Study of Liquid Variation in Spanish in Boston

The completion of data collection is scheduled for the start of the Fall semeste

Image with green background showing two examples of Subject Verb order in Spanish with the meaning Catalina sang. The first one is an SV order that says Catalina cantó, it is glossed as Catalina sign.PST.3sg and the second one, a VS order, says Cantó Catalina and is glossed as sing.PST.3sg Catalina.

Subject-Verb Order in Latin American Spanish

 This is the topic of my second Qualifying Paper @ BU. This was submitted as a Proceedings paper for LSA 2023.

Filled Pauses as a site of dialectal and language contact among Spanish-speaking Bostonians

 This was the topic of my first Qualifying Paper @ BU, as well as a joint publication with Danny Erker.

Image of two students at a school desk with text bubbles around them that have the Phonological Filled Pauses am, em, um, uh, ah, eh

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Publications

2022 Erker, D. & Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M. Qué decimos cuando no decimos nada: Claves del cambio lingüístico inducido por contacto en las pausas llenas del español conversacional. Estudios del Observatorio / Observatorio Studies, 80, pp. 1- 31.https://cervantesobservatorio.fas.harvard.edu/es/informes

 

2022 Erker, D. & Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M. What we say when we say nothing at all: Clues to contact-induced language change in Spanish conversational pause-fillers. Estudios del Observatorio / Observatorio Studies, 80, pp. 1- 31.https://cervantesobservatorio.fas.harvard.edu/en/reports

2021 Dionne, D. & Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M. (Eds). Proceedings of the 45th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

2014 Orozco, R., Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M, & Méndez Vallejo, Catalina. Los efectos condicionantes del verbo en el uso variable de los pronombres personales de sujeto. In: Actas del XVII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de la América Latina, João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil, July 14th-18th.

2013 Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M. El uso variable de los pronombres sujetos en el castellano puertorriqueño hablado en Luisiana y Puerto Rico. LSU Master's Theses. 3876. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/3876

2023 Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M.

Making a Splash: The Salience of Liquid Variation among Boston Spanish speakers, Linguistics Program - Northeastern University, Boston, MA, March 23rd

2023 Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M.

¿Va primero el verbo OR El sujeto va primero?: Subject-Verb order in Latin American Spanish, LSA 2023, Denver, CO, January 5th– 8th

2021 Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M. Filled pauses as a site of language contact among Spanish-speaking Bostonians. LSA 2021, (Virtual) January 9th.

2020 Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M. Guest Lecture: English/Spanish Contrastive Phonology & Filled Pauses. Intro to Sounds - Boston University, Boston, MA, October 15th.

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