What factors affect the way we sound when we speak a language? I'm interested in providing some answers to this question, namely for Spanish, at the level of both prosody (i.e., intonation, stress, rhythm) and individual sounds. I have looked at effects on the sound system of Spanish related to segments, syllables, words, phrases, pragmatic and syntactic conditions, and social variables. In the classroom, I integrate these research interests into courses dealing with general Spanish linguistics and Spanish phonetics and phonology at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in UW-Madison's Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Additionally, I am currently serving as the Director of UW-Madison's Language Sciences program, am affiliated with the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program and the Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition, and am an Associate Editor for the Heritage Language Journal.

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​​Contact Information:
Department of Spanish and Portuguese      
​University of Wisconsin-Madison                 
1220 Linden Drive                                        
1018 Van Hise Hall                                       
Madison, WI 53706

Language Sciences Program
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1220 Linden Drive
1168 Van Hise Hall
Madison, WI 53706

​Email: rgrao@wisc.edu