Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Katherine Jonard is a Ph.D. student in the Hispanic Linguistics program. She is originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and she received her B.A. in Spanish at Indiana Wesleyan University. During her undergraduate degree, Katherine spent four months in the Dominican Republic as a translator and trip leader, where she became interested in the acquisition of dialects by second language learners. She continued this research at West Virginia University, successfully defending a thesis and receiving her M.A. in Linguistics and a graduate certificate in Spanish. For her M.A. thesis, she used data from the LANGSNAP project to study second language acquisition of dialectal phonemes in students who studied a year abroad in either Spain or Mexico. Her research interests include second language acquisition, dialectology, and phonology; she is particularly interested in further studying the acquisition of dialectal phonemes by second language learners.