Laura Colantoni

Laura Colantoni is a Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She received her BA in Linguistics from the University of Buenos Aires and her PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on sound change and categorization and the second language acquisition of variable phonetic parameters. She published an edited volume on Argentine Spanish in 2013 (Perspectivas teóricas y experimentales sobre el español de la Argentina, Iberoamericana, w / C. Rodríguez Louro), and has recently published another book: Second Language Speech: An Introduction (w / P. Escudero, & J. Steele) with Cambridge University Press. In recent years, she has been working on several SSHRC and U of T supported research projects, alone and in collaboration with colleagues in French, Linguistics and Speech and Language pathology. Her most recent SSHRC-funded collaborative project (A. T. Pérez-Leroux, S. Béjar, A. Cuza, E. Johnson, N. Mazzaro, & J. Schertz) focuses on the impact of phonetic variability on the first language acquisition of grammatical properties in Spanish-English bilinguals. She is also currently collaborating with A. Kochetov and J. Steele on an electropalatographic study of assimilatory patterns in English, French and Spanish as first and second languages.