Miquel Simonet
"The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession." Sherlock Holmes in The Valley of Fear, Arthur C. Doyle.
Scholarship. Miquel Simonet is an experimental phonologist. Experimental phonologists employ the auxiliary theories and methods of instrumental phonetics and experimental psycholinguistics to investigate phonological competence, representation. Miquel's principal area of expertise is bilingual and second-language phonological competence, which he studies by analyzing the production, perception, and processing of the sounds and (the phonological structure of) words of a second language in (emergent) bilinguals. A second area of expertise is phonological variation and change, with a focus on Iberian Romance. Miquel's publications have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Phonetics, the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Language and Speech, Second Language Research, the International Journal of Bilingualism, Phonetica, Laboratory Phonology, Linguistics, Probus, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Languages, Hispania, and Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics. See Faculty Profile > Scholarly Contributions for a list of publications and Google Scholar for approximate citation impact.
Service. Between 2019 and 2022, Miquel served as Director of Graduate Studies and main graduate advisor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Since 2018, he chairs the Cognitive Dimensions concentration in the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT GIDP) doctoral program. Since 2021, he serves as the COH IRB Liaison, which means that, among other things, he leads the scholarly review process in COH. Miquel is also member of the graduate faculty in the Department of Linguistics. In terms of service to the profession, Miquel serves (or has served) as Associate Editor of Journal of Phonetics (2022-2025) and of Applied Psycholinguistics (2018-2021), and is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Second Language Research, Applied Psycholinguistics, and Laboratory Phonology. He is a member of the International Phonetic Association and of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
Graduate Advising. One of Miquel's goals as a mentor is to help create a collaborative, lab-centered culture in which experimental research is conducted by a small team of researchers rather than by individuals working alone on their own (personal) projects and pursuing only their own interests. In a laboratory, team members work on subprojects, closely connected to each others', under an umbrella project. In this way, the team is able to address bigger questions more deeply and thoroughly. It is not easy to find a place for collaborative empiricism in the modern humanities. The empirical humanities value intellectual modesty, thoroughness, and objective verification, an approach it shares with the behavioral (and some of the social) sciences. Miquel will continue to invite his students to consider his approach to conducting research. Miquel welcomes inquiries from prospective students who would like to write their doctoral dissertation on phonological variation and change in Iberian Romance, Ibero-Romance laboratory phonology, or second language phonetics and phonological processing, with a focus on experimental, instrumental research. Miquel can supervise student researchers in both the PhD Program in Hispanic Linguistics (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese) and the PhD Program in SLAT (Graduate College GIDP). He will only consider advising dissertators who, by the time they advance to candidacy, have taken two graduate courses with him (SPAN 583A, and SPAN 583C or SPAN 599). Ideally, they would have also taken at least one graduate course in statistics (e.g., LING 507) and phonetics/phonology or psycholinguistics courses in the Department of Linguistics (e.g., LING 515).
Vita. Miquel graduated with a PhD in Spanish, with a designated emphasis in Romance Linguistics, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2008), where he wrote his dissertation as an advisee of Professor José I. Hualde. Miquel has been at the University of Arizona since 2008 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2015. He was born and raised on the island of Majorca, on the western Mediterranean, and his native language is Catalan. His personal interests include literature and landscape photography.