About
I'm a linguist working primarily in the fields of Second Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, and Sociophonetics. My research focuses on the development of fluency and cognitive abilities by second-language learners and how factors such as cognition, syntactic complexity, and word order affect second-language speech development. I am particularly interested in understanding the effects of language-immersion contexts, as well as of language use and interaction, on second-language linguistic development. More recently, I form part of a large humanities-based collaboration whose mission is to explore how language is entangled with cultural identity through the Patagonian Boers, a community that traces its roots to the South-African Boers who settled in Patagonia, Argentina, in the twentieth century. The title of our project is "From Africa to Patagonia: Voices of displacement".
Selected Recent Publications
García-Amaya, Lorenzo. (in press). An investigation into utterance-fluency patterns of advanced L2 bilinguals Afrikaans and Spanish in Patagonia. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism.
Cintrón-Valentín, M., & Lorenzo García-Amaya. (2021). Investigating textual enhancement and captions in L2 grammar and vocabulary: An experimental study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1-26.
García-Amaya, Lorenzo. (2021). A change of setting: Measuring language use in an overseas immersion context. Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education, 6, 32–58.
García-Amaya, Lorenzo & Sean Lang. (2020). Filled pauses are susceptible to cross-language phonetic influence: Data from Afrikaans-Spanish bilinguals. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1–29.
Szpiech, Ryan, Joshua Shapero, Andries Coetzee, Lorenzo García-Amaya, Paulina Alberto, Victoria Langland, Ellie Johandes, & Nicholas Henriksen. (2020). Afrikaans in Patagonia: Language shift and cultural integration in a rural immigrant community. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 266, 33-54.
Cintrón-Valentín, Myrna, Lorenzo García-Amaya, & Nick C. Ellis. (2019). Captioning and grammar learning in the L2 Spanish classroom. The Language Learning Journal, 47, 439-459.
García-Amaya, Lorenzo. (2017). Detailing L1 and L2 use in study-abroad research: Data from the Daily Linguistic Questionnaire. System, 71, 60–72.
Recent Courses Taught
- Spanish 418: Theories of Second Language Acquisition
- Spanish 487: The Acquisition of Spanish in a Study Abroad Setting
- Spanish 413: Methods of Teaching Spanish
- Spanish 298: Introduction to Spanish Linguistics
Research Areas(s)
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Second Language Acquisition, Second Language Oral Fluency, Psycholinguistics, Second Language Cognition, Study Abroad, Bilingualism, Andalusian Spanish, Sociophonetics
Affiliation(s)
