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Research

Bay Area Spanish

My work on Bay Area Spanish focuses on the production and perception of Spanish vowels and consonants, and how both can be affected by experience with bilingualism.

Helms, Annie, Gabriella Licata & Rachel Weiher. (2022). Influence of orthography in production and perception of /b/ in US Spanish. Estudios de Fonética Experimental XXXI, 9-29.

Helms, Annie. (2022). Bay Area Spanish: regional sound change in contact languages. RLLT17, eds. Ora Matushansky, Laurent Roussarie, Michela Russo, Elena Soare & Sophie Wauquier. Special issue of Isogloss Open Journal of Romance Linguistics 8(2)/17: 1-18.

Helms, Annie. (2020). Bay Area Spanish: Regional sound change in contact languages. Talk presented virtually at Going Romance 34, hosted by Structures Formelles du Langage. [Slides]

Licata, Gabriella, Annie Helms & Rachel Weiher. (2019). Merger in production and perception? Bilingual discrimination of Spanish /β/ and /v/. Talk presented at the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium at the University of Texas at El Paso. [Slides]

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Bilingualism in Catalonia

My research in bilingualism in Catalonia centers on the production of vowels in Spanish and in Catalan. I investigate changes in the vowel space over time in order to observe bidirectional outcomes of language contact and the social and linguistic factors that mediate this change, such as age, language dominance, and cognate status.

Helms, Annie. (2023). Sociophonetic analysis of mid front vowel production in Barcelona. In Barbara E. Bullock, Cinzia Russi & Almeida Jacqueline Toribio (eds.), A half century of Romance linguistics: Selected proceedings of the 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. Berlin: Language Science Press, pp. 249–268.

Helms, Annie. (2021). Bidirectionality of language contact: Spanish and Catalan vowels. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 6(1): 159-172.

Helms, Annie. (2021). Bidirectionality of language contact: Spanish and Catalan vowels. Poster presented virtually at LSA 2021 Annual Meeting. [Poster]

Helms, Annie. (2020). Sociophonetic variability in the production of Spanish /e/ by Catalan-Spanish bilinguals in Barcelona. Talk presented virtually at the 50th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages at the University of Texas at Austin. [Slides]

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Intraspeaker and Interspeaker Variation: Vowels

I am interested in novel methods of analyzing and visualizing intraspeaker variation across different task types and media of communication, especially in regards to vowel productions. Following the methodology in Story and Bunton (2017), I use density-controlled measures of vowel space area as correlates of intelligibility and centralization. Below are heatmap visualizations of density-controlled vowel space area for a speaker across two different communication formats.

Bleaman, Isaac, Katie Cugno & Annie Helms. (2023). Medium shifting and intraspeaker variation in conversational interviews. Language Variation and Change, First View, 1-25.

Helms, Annie. (2022). Utilizing density-controlled vowel space area to examine the role of language dominance in the acquisition of Spanish and English vowel reduction patterns. Talk presented at the 10th International Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Language Speech (New Sounds 2022), hosted by the Universitat de Barcelona. [Slides, GitHub Repo]

Bleaman, Isaac, Katie Cugno & Annie Helms. (2022). Medium shifting as a constraint on intraspeaker variation in virtual interviews. Talk presented at the LSA 2022 Annual Meeting, Washington D.C.

Bleaman, Isaac, Katie Cugno & Annie Helms. (2021). Increased intelligibility (but not formality) in Zoom interviews. Talk presented virtually at NWAV 49, hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. [Recorded presentation]