Associate Chair; Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics
About
My research focuses on issues in the phonetics and phonology of different varieties of Spanish from a theoretical perspective, employing laboratory methods to validate my claims. My earliest publications focused on question intonation in Peninsular Spanish, working primarily within the autosegmental-metrical framework of intonational structure. More recently, I have begun to explore sociophonetic variation in Manchego Spanish (spoken in south-central Spain) and in Andalusian Spanish (spoken in southern Spain). I am particularly interested in understanding the linguistic factors that differentiate the Western and Eastern sub-varieties of Andalusian Spanish. At Michigan I have embarked on a collaborative research project that examines the linguistic features of Afrikaans-Spanish bilinguals who live in Patagonia, Argentina. The latter project is based on a collaboration with Andries Coetzee (Department of Linguistics), Lorenzo García-Amaya (RLL), and Ryan Szpiech (RLL).
I have published articles in Journal of Phonetics, Laboratory Phonology, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Phonetica, Language and Speech, and Probus. In 2016 I published a co-edited volume entitled Intonational grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields, through John Benjamins Publishing Company (co-editors: Meghan Armstrong of University of Massachusetts & Maria del Mar Vanrell of Freie Universität Berlin). In 2021, I was awarded the Linguistic Society of America's Early Career Award.
Recent publications
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.
Henriksen, Nicholas & Lorenzo García-Amaya. (2019). Falsetto in interaction in Western Andalusian Spanish: A pilot study. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, 34, 101-124.
Henriksen, Nicholas. (2017). Patterns of vowel laxing and harmony in Iberian Spanish: Data from production and perception. Journal of Phonetics, 63, 106-126.
Henriksen, Nicholas & Sarah Harper. (2016). Investigating lenition patterns in south-central Peninsular Spanish /sp st sk/ clusters. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 46(3), 287-310.
Henriksen, Nicholas. (2016). Investigating the nature of the left periphery in Peninsular Spanish wh-question intonation. Phonetica, 73(1), 1-32.
Henriksen, Nicholas. (2015). Syllable structure and word stress effects in Peninsular Spanish nuclear accents. Laboratory Phonology, 6(1), 53-86.
Undergraduate courses taught
Spanish 298: Introduction to Spanish Linguistics
Spanish 355: New World Spanish (Spanish in the United States)
Spanish 410: Spanish phonetics & phonology
Spanish 416: Spanish sociolinguistics
Spanish 487: Spanish second language phonology
Research areas
Spanish phonetics & phonology, intonation, prosody, sociophonetics, experimental phonetics, second language speech learning
Affiliations
- Romance Languages and Literatures
- Linguistics
