Research

Overview

My main interest is to analyze the speech of heritage speakers and bilinguals from shared linguistic spaces and borderlands. My aim in research is to better understand the relationship between social, attitudinal and language experience variables and the speech patterns of groups of speakers with high levels of inter- and intra-speaker variability. I am mostly interested in showing how their sound system is complex and dynamic by looking at their phonetics and phonology, with a special focus on prosody.

I am currently working on describing speech perception and production patterns in border varieties: (1) Spanish and Portuguese along the Uruguay–Brazil border, and (2) Mexican-American Spanish and English in California. I have also recently begun delving into native languages such as Chumash.

Publications

Machado, V. & Ward. O. (2024) ¿Soy de Ribera o Rivera?: Sociolinguistic [b]/[v]
Variation in Rivera Spanish. Languages Journal, special issue “Language in Borderlands”.

Machado, V. (2024) The Prosody of Uruguayan-Brazilian border Spanish: Cross-generational and Social Variation (PhD dissertation). University of Toronto, Canada.

Ortiz, A. and Machado, V. (2023) Technology-mediated Action-oriented Projects in an Asynchronous Class: a Pathway to the Re-negotiation of the Plurilingual Identity in Heritage Language Learners. The 2nd International Congress on Pedagogical Mediation in Language Learning, UNAD, Colombia.

Machado V., Escobar, L. (2023) The prosody of Montevideo Spanish: an intonational, rhythmic and tempo description. CLA congress, York University, Canada.

Rato, A. and Machado, V. (2024) Perception and production of stops by Canadian Heritage Speakers of European Portuguese. In Rao, R. (eds), The Phonetics and Phonology of Heritage Languages. pp. 343 – 360 Cambridge University Press.

Aziz, J., Machado, V., Swederski, N., Valdivia, C., Stevenson, R., Rafat, Y. and Rao, R. (2022). Intonation patterns in Argentinean– and Venezuelan Canadian heritage speakers of Spanish: parental and English influences. Heritage Language Journal.

In preparation

Machado, V., Dean, J., Colmenero, A., & Ernst, E. (in prep). Rhythm and speech rate in Ventureño Spanish: A speech production study of Mexican American heritage speakers in California. Conducted through the Sociolinguistics Speech Lab, CSUCI.

Machado, V. and Narayan, C. (in prep). Sociolinguistic Dynamics of Palatal Liquid Vocalization in a Bilingual Border Community: Investigating the Acoustic Properties of Palatal Liquid Vocalization in Uruguayan Portuguese.

Machado, V. and Narayan, C. (in prep). Lexical competition in Spanish-Portuguese Bilinguals of Uruguay.

Machado, V. (in prep) Prosody in Uruguayan Border Spanish: Rhythm and Speech rate in Spanish-Portuguese bilinguals.