About
My research focuses on issues in the phonetics and phonology of different varieties of Spanish from an experimental perspective, drawing from related fields such as sociophonetics, dialect variation, and diachronic linguistics. My most recent publications are based on the intonational structure of questions and statements in varieties of Spanish spoken in northern, central, and southern Spain, adhering to principles in autosegmental prosodic structure and stylistic variation. Although I am broadly interested in aspects of Spanish prosodic structure, I have recently begun work on segmental issues, namely sociophonetic variation in rhotics in Spanish. I have presented my research at conferences such as Speech Prosody, Tone and Intonation in Europe, The Chicago Linguistics Society, New Ways of Analyzing Variation, Phonetics and Phonology in Iberia, and the Second Language Research Forum.
A number of publications are forthcoming in various journals and conference proceedings. In my most recent article, published in Language and Speech, I present an experimental analysis of the structure of final rises in Manchego Spanish yes/no questions, addressing issues in intonational phonology and the acoustic correlates of question signaling. In a forthcoming paper in Probus, I document the internal structure of initial peaks and final falls in wh-questions in Manchego Spanish. My paper in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association adopts a sociophonetic approach, exploring the social motivations of intonational variation (speech style and gender in particular). I also collaborate with Lorenzo García-Amaya, a colleague in RLL, on intonational variation in the Spanish spoken in Andalusian Spain.
Recent Publications
Henriksen, Nicholas. (In press). Style, prosodic variation, and the social meaning of intonation. Journal of the International Phonetics Association, 43(2).
Henriksen, Nicholas. (In press). The acoustic correlates of question signaling in Peninsular Spanish: Three sentence types compared. In Proceedings of the 47th Chicago Linguistics Society.
Henriksen, Nicholas C. (Accepted). Suprasegmental phonology in second language speech. In The Handbook of Spanish Second Language Acquisition, ed. by K. Geeslin. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Henriksen, Nicholas. (2013). Initial peaks and final falls in the intonation of Manchego Peninsular Spanish wh-questions. Probus, 25(1), 1-25.
Henriksen, Nicholas. (2012). The intonation and signaling of declarative questions in Manchego Peninsular Spanish. Language and Speech, 55(4), 543-576.
Henriksen, Nicholas & Lorenzo García-Amaya. (2012). Transcription of intonation of Jerezano Andalusian Spanish. Estudios de Fonética Experimental, 21, 109-162.
Undergraduate Courses Taught
Spanish 355: New world Spanish
Spanish 410: Spanish phonetics & phonology
Spanish 487: Spanish sociolinguistics
