The HLS 2025 Young Scholar Travel Grant is a competitive award that supports early-career researchers in Hispanic linguistics, providing funding to attend the symposium and present their work.
See below for more about the awardees and the research they will be presenting at HLS 2025:
Brisa del Bosque, PhD Student, University of New Mexico
Brisa del Bosque has taught Spanish in the United States for 23 years, and was the founder of the first Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL) programs in Denver high schools. She has also worked as a trainer for bilingual instructors. Her passion is to ensure Spanish continues to thrive among new generations, both, inside and outside the classroom. Her research focuses on perceptions of pronunciation in northern Mexico, parents’ attitudes toward Spanish when raising heritage speakers n in the U.S., SHL pedagogical practices, and decolonial approaches to teaching heritage languages.
Brisa's research:
Adquisición de demostrativos en niños bilingües: un estudio longitudinal
Este estudio analiza la producción de demostrativos en dos gemelos bilingües inglés-español, de Salamanca (1-5 años) a partir de datos del corpus CHILDES. Se extrajeron instancias de formas de demostrativos próximos (this/these, este/esta) y no próximos (that/those, ese/esa), codificados por lengua, edad y tipo de demostrativo. También se calcularon puntuaciones de Longitud Media de Enunciado (MLU). Los resultados de una regresión logística mostraron que la edad influyó en el uso en español: a los dos años predominaban los no próximos, pero a partir de los tres años, aumentó el uso de próximos. Este patrón refleja una posible influencia del inglés, donde that es más frecuente que this. En inglés no se observó cambio según la edad. Los hallazgos sugieren que el bilingüismo puede moldear la gramática emergente del español y que la exposición al inglés influye en el desarrollo de los demostrativos.
Coral I. Zayas Colón, PhD Candidate, Temple University
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Zayas-Colón earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico–Río Piedras and a Ph.D. in Spanish (Sociolinguistics) at Temple University, where her dissertation focused on the Uruguay–Brazil border. Her research centers on marginalized languages in education, integrating policy analysis, classroom practice, and culturally responsive pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on the construction and maintenance of language ideologies in multilingual communities.
Coral's research:
Border Talk, Border Texts: Mapping Language Ideologies and Exclusionary Inclusion at the Uruguayan-Brazilian Border
This study employs a multiscale documentary method, integrating Critical Discourse Analysis with sociolinguistic indexicality, to explore how official language policies in the Spanish-speaking world construct and perpetuate monolingual ideologies. Focusing on Rivera, Uruguay—a twin city with Brazil’s Santana do Livramento—the research analyzes four policy documents (2008–2019) from Uruguay's Comisión de Políticas Lingüísticas.
The methodology features three analytical tiers: Genealogical Mapping, Critical Coding, and Indexical Readings. Findings highlight “vertical bilingualism,” where only standard Brazilian Portuguese is accepted, and “exclusionary inclusion,” where policy preambles celebrate diversity while concrete measures re-center hegemonic norms, marginalizing local linguistic repertoires. This paradox reveals policies that simultaneously promote Portuguese as an asset and treat it as a deficiency. The study demonstrates how documentary analysis, by historicizing texts and operationalizing ideology, can yield granular insights. Theoretically, it reconceptualizes language policy as a scalar assemblage that reflects and produces sociolinguistic hierarchies, showing how terms like “inclusion” can index both equitable aspiration and exclusionary gatekeeping across different scales.
Hee Joong Choi, PhD Student, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Hee Joong CHOI is a South Korean Hispanic linguist. He has been engaged with Spanish for more than 18 years. After majoring in Spanish from a foreign language high school to M.A. degree at Seoul National University, he started pursuing a Ph.D. degree at UMass Amherst with Dr. María Biezma as advisor. His research focuses on semantics and pragmatics of non-canonical speech acts (questions, commands, etc.). Current work on Puerto Rican Spanish reflects his analytical lens on the Spanish-speaking community in the U.S. Northeast, with additional advice from Dr. Meghan Armstrong-Abrami. Maintaining his position as a theoretical linguist, Hee Joong would like to bridge gaps between different languages and cultures.
Hee Joong's research:
Bias Without Negation: The Role of Prosody in Puerto Rican Spanish Polar Questions
Contributing to the discussion of whether intonation directly encodes a speech act type or modulates speaker stance/commitments, this study investigates whether question bias in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) can be conveyed solely through intonation. Prior work often links question bias to 'high negation' (Romero and Han, 2004; inter alia) with potential prosody. To isolate intonation's role, sentential negation is removed in this study. Instead, aspectual predicates that trigger negative inference are used:
(1) Dejaste de fumar recientemente
'You recently stopped smoking.' (~> 'You don't smoke anymore.')
PRS is well-suited due to its lack of subject-verb inversion, rendering interrogatives string-identical to declaratives, thus a structurally ambiguous construction. Findings from a perception experiment show that the bias contour (H+L* L%; see Armstrong, 2017) did not consistently yield question interpretations in bias-rich contexts, favoring the commitment-based theories.
Jorge Agulló, Junior Research Fellow, Queens College (University of Cambridge)
Jorge Agulló is Junior Research Fellow in Ibero-Romance Linguistics at Queens’ College (University of Cambridge) and, starting October 2025, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in the University of Cambridge. His doctoral dissertation won the Prize for the Best Doctoral Dissertation, awarded by the Linguistic Society of Spain. Agulló has previously lectured in the University of Vienna (Austria) as a postdoctoral university assistant and in the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) as a predoctoral fellow. Agulló has been Visiting Researcher at the University of Montreal (2020-2021) and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Munich (2024) and at the University of Vienna (2024).
He has published around twenty research papers and book chapters on syntax, grammatical variation, and diachronic syntax; specifically, on existential constructions in varieties of Spanish in contact with Catalan, resumptive pronouns, the internal structure of clitics in Spanish, unagreement phenomena in Catalan, Spanish and Slovenian and the featural composition of the Determiner Phrase, and related issues. Agulló is currently editing the collective volume Theoretical approaches to clitics(Linguistik Aktuell, John Benjamins), and he is also member of the Editorial Committee of several journals.
Jorge's research:
Resumptive pronouns in Spanish as doubling and movement
This study offers theoretical insight into resumptive pronouns, which have been a long-standing issue in generative syntax since Ross (1967) and subsequent work (e.g., Kroch 1981; Chomsky 1982; Safir 1986; McCloskey 2002), where the base-generation approach has been the mainstream assumption. Resumptive pronouns outside islands, though, have received almost no attention. It will be shown that these constructions in Spanish show all the hallmarks of movement (e.g., anaphoric reconstruction, quantifier-variable binding and scope, (Secondary) Weak Crossover effects) and thus qualify as syntactically inactive resumptive pronouns in Asudeh’s (2012) classification. I argue, within Chomsky’s (1995) Minimalist Programme, that resumptive pronouns are functional heads D(eterminer) that double the head of the relative clause in the bound-variable position—hence following the movement approach to relative clauses (e.g., Kayne 1994; Bianchi 1999; Boeckx 2003). The head then moves to Spec, CP and can strand the D head, which results in resumption. This research will be shown to offer valuable insight into relative clauses and, more generally, long-distance syntactic dependencies.
Monica(Yumeng)Shen, PhD Student, University of California - San Diego
Monica (Yumeng) Shen is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. She works with Dr. Anne L. Beatty-Martínez and Dr. Sarah Creel. Her research focuses on speech perception, production, and adaptation among bilinguals and second-language speakers in diverse linguistic contexts. She is also interested in applying automatic speech recognition technologies to the study of bilingualism and foreign-accented speech.
Monica's research:
When Machines Hear Variation: An Automatic Speech Recognition Approach to Spanish Grammatical Gender
Spanish nouns usually follow clear grammatical gender assignment, but some “dual-gender nouns” (DGNs)–feminine nouns beginning with stressed /a/ that often take masculine determiners—blur the line between prescriptive rules and everyday use. How do humans and machines handle such ambiguity? In this study, forty-one Spanish speakers completed a sentence-repetition task. We integrate the open-source Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model to automate the transcription and scoring pipeline for sentence-repetition tasks. Results showed that humans reliably corrected gender violations with regular nouns but showed lower and variable correction rates for DGNs. Whisper mirrored this pattern: it captured the grammaticality effect with regular nouns but largely ignored violations involving DGNs. These findings suggest that both humans and machines are influenced by real-world usage patterns rather than prescriptive norms. While Whisper shows promise for psycholinguistic research, its behavior in ambiguous contexts highlights the need to account for language variation when using ASR tools.