Owen Ward

PhD Candidate
owen.ward@mail.utoronto.ca

Campus

  • Downtown Toronto (St. George)

Fields of Study

  • Linguistics

Areas of Interest

  • Phonology, Phonetics;
  • Spanish, Portuguese;
  • Language acquisition;
  • Stress, Speech perception, Intonation.

 

Working Dissertation

Title

The role of vowel reduction in the perception and production of English lexical stress by Spanish and Portuguese speakers

Supervisors

Prof. Anabela Rato

Description

My thesis examines the relationship between the existence of vowel reduction in a learner's L1 phonology and how it interacts with the acquisition of stress in an L2. Secondary goals include identifying which phonetic cues are more important for Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese speakers when listening for L2 stress contrasts in English.

Biography

Owen Ward is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on second language acquisition of phonetics and phonology in English, Spanish and Portuguese. His thesis, The role of vowel reduction in the perception and production of English lexical stress by Spanish and Portuguese speakers, seeks to establish a link between suprasegmentals and segmentals in the acquisition of second language phonology.

He completed his bachelor’s degree in Spanish with a specialization in translation and a French minor at the University of Waterloo in 2015, where he worked as a TA for the beginner-level Spanish language labs. In 2013, he studied abroad in Cuba at the University of Holguín where he took courses in Spanish/English translation, Spanish language and Cuban cinema. He was also the recipient of the Spanish Embassy Book Prize for the 2011-2012 academic year and the Laura López Kok Memorial Scholarship in 2013.

Upon graduating in 2015 he began a master’s degree at the University of Western Ontario in Hispanic linguistics (linguistics stream). At UWO he was able to use his familiarity with Cuba and the University of Holguín to be appointed the Community Service Learning (CSL) Cuba Coordinator, which is a program Western carries out in partnership with the University of Holguín in which students travel to Cuba during reading week to practise their Spanish and learn about Cuban culture while performing community service at various locations in Holguín. It was at the University of Western Ontario also where he discovered his fascination for phonetics and phonology and how learners acquire the phonology of a foreign language. Ultimately, it was his studies there that led to him to pursue a PhD at the University of Toronto.

He was awarded with the WSRC Entrance Scholarship upon starting his doctoral studies in 2017. Since then, Owen has been a TA for beginner and intermediate Spanish courses as well as a research assistant. He has presented papers and done poster presentations at conferences including QODAS, ExPortLi and New Sounds. Currently, he is working on his thesis as well as co-authoring a paper with his supervisor, Prof. Anabela Rato, which they aim to publish in a journal.

Education

BA, University of Waterloo
MA, University of Western Ontario

Presentations

Rato, A & Ward, O. “Predicting difficulty in the perception of non-native consonants: The role of cross-linguistic perceptual similarity”, II Experimental Portuguese Linguistics Workshop, University of Toronto, Canada, April 26, 2019.
Ward, O. “Perception of L2 Spanish Lexical Stress by L1 English Listeners”, New Sounds 2019, Waseda University, Japan, August 30-September 1, 2019.
Rato, A & Ward, O. “The predictive role of cross-language phonetic similarity in L2 consonant learning”, New Sounds 2019, Waseda University, Japan, August 30-September 1, 2019.

Cohort

  • 2017-2018