Ji Young Kim

Title: Assistant Professor
Department: Spanish and Portuguese
Email: jiyoungkim@ucla.edu

Current Project(s):

• Her research focuses on how Spanish heritage speakers in the US perceive and produce the speech sounds in Spanish, when language shift to English is prominent across the generations. She is currently investigating the phonetic features of “heritage accent” in heritage speakers’ speech, which is often perceived by monolingual native speakers, but the source of which is very difficult to identify. Moreover, as there is a large variation among Spanish heritage speakers with regard to their identity as Latinos/as in the US and their attitudes toward learning Spanish, her goal is to explore more deeply into the role of various extra-linguistic factors in the development of heritage speakers’ phonological system.

Available Publications/Books:

• Kim, J.-Y. Heritage speakers’ use of prosodic strategies in focus marking in Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism. Prepublished March 27, 2018, DOI:10.1177/1367006918763139
• Boomershine, A., & Kim, J.-Y. (2018). Speech perception, In K. L. Geeslin (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics (pp. 237-257). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Kim, J.-Y. (2017). Voice quality transfer in the production of Spanish heritage speakers and English L2 learners of Spanish, In S. Perpiñán, D. Heap, I. Moreno-Villamar, & A. Soto-Corominas (Eds.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11: Selected Proceedings of the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), London, Ontario (pp. 191-207). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Tagged: Linguistics, Heritage Language Acquisition, Bilingualism, Experimental Phonetics and Phonology