Area Chair in Cognitive Dimensions of L2 Learning
Home Department: Spanish and Portuguese
Affiliated Faculty: Cognitive Science GIDP, Department of Linguistics
SLAT Areas of Specialization: Cognitive Dimensions of L2 Learning, Linguistic Dimensions of L2 Learning, Sociocultural Dimensions of L2 Learning
"The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession." Sherlock Holmes in The Valley of Fear, Arthur C. Doyle.
Miquel Simonet is an experimental, laboratory phonologist. Experimental phonologists employ the auxiliary theories and methods of instrumental phonetics and experimental psycholinguistics to investigate phonological competence, representation. Miquel's principal area of expertise is bilingual and second-language phonological competence, which he studies by analyzing the production, perception, and processing of the sounds and (the phonological structure of) words of a second language in (emergent) bilinguals. A second area of expertise is phonological variation and change, with a focus on Iberian Romance. Miquel's publications have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Phonetics, the Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Language and Speech, Second Language Research, the International Journal of Bilingualism, Phonetica, Laboratory Phonology, Linguistics, Probus, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Languages, Hispania, and Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics. See Faculty Profile > Scholarly Contributions for a list of publications and Google Scholar for approximate citation impact.
Dr. Simonet has supervised graduate student researchers in both the PhD Program in Hispanic Linguistics (Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese) and the PhD Program in SLAT (Graduate College GIDP). He has directed 11 PhD dissertations so far, and he is now directing 6 concurrent PhD dissertations. Additionally, he has served as member in 16 PhD dissertation committees in various institutions, including institutions in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. He will only consider advising dissertators who, by the time they advance to candidacy, have taken at least two graduate courses with him (SPAN 583A, and SPAN 583C or SPAN 599). Ideally, students would have also taken at least one graduate course in statistics (e.g., LING 507) and phonetics/phonology or psycholinguistics courses in the Department of Linguistics (e.g., LING 515). He recommends students in Hispanic linguistics to do a PhD minor in Linguistics or SLAT to complement their education.
He currently serves as Associate Editor of Journal of Phonetics (2022-2027) and used to serve as Associate Editor of Applied Psycholinguistics (2018-2021). He serves on the editorial boards of the journals Second Language Research, Applied Psycholinguistics, and Laboratory Phonology. Between January 2019 and July 2022, he was Director of Graduate Studies in Spanish & Portuguese, and he served as main graduate advisor for students in Hispanic Linguistics until May 2024. Between 2018 and 2023, he was the area chair for the Cognitive Dimensions concentration in the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) interdepartmental doctoral program and served on the Executive Committee of SLAT. Since August 2021, he served as the COH IRB Liaison, which means that, among other things, he supports his colleagues in COH regarding the IRB process. He is also member of the graduate faculty in the Department of Linguistics.
Dr. Simonet graduated with a PhD in Romance Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2008). His doctoral advisor was José I. Hualde. The other members of his dissertation committee were Jennifer Cole, Ana M. Escobar, and Zsuzsanna Fagyal. He has been at the University of Arizona since 2008, was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure in 2015, and to (full) Professor in 2023. He was born and raised on the island of Majorca, on the western Mediterranean, and his native language is (Majorcan) Catalan. His personal interests include literature (classic and literary fiction, and creative nonfiction), landscapes (contemplating and photographing them), and photography (travel, architecture, lanscapes).