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Research

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I have previously served as a Grad Assistant and Lab Manager for Dr. Danny Erker in the Spanish in Boston Project, where I focused on transcribing and annotating sociolinguistic interviews related to various social and linguistic phenomena. Currently, I continue to contribute to the project through data creation, extraction, and cleaning, as well as running statistical analyses and creating visualizations.

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 served as a Grad Assistant for Dr. Neil Myler's Mirror Principle Violations Project, where I surveyed existing descriptive materials on a wide range of languages to describe the interactions between causative and applicative morphemes.

Covariation & Salience in Linguistic Contact: A Sociophonetic Study of Liquid Variation in Spanish

Data collection and statistical analysis are complete. Currently, I am writing and editing the dissertation. Results have been presented at various international conferences, including NWAV 51LSA 2024, and NWAV Miami.

Breakdown of the data used in the dissertation: 24,245 total tokens, 7240 pronoun presence tokens, 4079 subject position tokens, 1718 filled pauses tokens, 7372 tokens of liquids, 3836 tokens of coda /s/
Image Description: An image with a green background featuring a lightbulb in the top right corner. The image is divided into two sections, each with a headline.  This image illustrates Subject-Verb (SV) and Verb-Subject (VS) sentence orders in Spanish, providing examples and glosses for each.   Headlines:  SUBJECT-VERB: Example 1 (labeled as 1): Spanish sentence "Catalina cantó." (SV) Gloss: Catalina sing.PST.3sg. English Translation: 'Catalina sang.' VERB-SUBJECT: Example 2 (labeled as 2): Spanish sentence "Cantó Catalina." (VS) Gloss: sing.PST.3sg Catalina. English Translation: 'Catalina sang.'

Subject-Verb Order in Latin American Spanish

 This is the topic of my second Qualifying Paper @ BU. The article on this topic can be found here.

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 Description:  In this image, there is a depiction of a school desk with two students engaged in conversation. Text bubbles surround them, each containing examples of Spanish & English Phonological Filled Pauses. The students are positioned as if in discussion, creating a dynamic scene.  Text Bubbles:  The first text bubble contains the phonological-filled pause "umm," available in English. The second text bubble contains "em," available in Spanish. The third text bubble contains "am," available in English & Spanish. The fourth text bubble contains "uh," available in English. The fifth text bubble contains "ah," available in English & Spanish. The sixth text bubble contains "eh," available in Spanish. The inclusion of these phonological-filled pauses in the image adds an educational element, illustrating the diverse forms of vocalized pauses commonly observed in Spanish and/or English. This representation aims to enhance understanding and awareness of these linguistic elements.

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Publications

ORCID iD Logo that links to Lee-Ann Vidal-Covas' ORCID iD record

2024 Erker, Daniel G. & Vidal-Covas, Lee-Ann M. Variation, Contact, and Change in Boston Spanish: How social meaning shapes stylistic practice and bilingual optimization. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 17(2), 223-249. https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2024-2010

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2023 Vidal-Covas, Lee-Ann M. ¿Va primero el verbo? OR ¿El sujeto va primero?: Subject-verb order in Latin American Spanish. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 8(1). 5542. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5542

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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, 80, pp. 1- 31. https://cervantesobservatorio.fas.harvard.edu/es/informes

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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.  Observatorio Studies, 80, pp. 1- 31. https://cervantesobservatorio.fas.harvard.edu/en/reports

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

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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.

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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

Past

2024 Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M.

Salient Features, Strong Identities: Social Meaning and Stylistic Choices in Boston Spanish, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, December 3rd

2024 Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M.

How Salience Influences Dialectal Persistence and Covariation: Insights from Boston's Spanish-Speaking Community, New Waves of Analyzing Linguistic Variation (NWAV 52), Miami, FL, November 7th - 9th

2024 Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M.

Riding the Waves of Salience: Exploring Spanish Liquid Variation among Boston Spanish speaker, Linguistic Society of America (LSA), NYC, NY, January 4th - 7th

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

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

2024 Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M.

Investigating salience and ideologies in Greater Boston: A sociophonetic analysis of liquid variation, The International Symposium on Language Ideologies and Attitudes (IDEOLING), Palma de Mallorca, Spain, October 17th - 19th

2023 Vidal Covas, Lee-Ann M.

Making a Splash: The Salience of Liquid Variation among Boston Spanish speakers, New Waves of Analyzing Linguistic Variation (NWAV), NYC, NY, Oct 13th - 17th

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.

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