Faculty Directory of the Institute for the Empirical Study of Language
OHIO Faculty Members
Emilia Alonso-Marks, Professor Emerita and IESL Director
Modern Languages, College of Arts & Sciences
Emilia Alonso-Marks is Professor Emerita of Spanish language and linguistics at Ohio University. She earned her doctorate in Applied Linguistics from the Universidad de Sevilla, Spain. She teaches courses in Spanish language, culture and linguistics for the Department of Modern Languages and the Latin American Studies Program. She received a Presidential Teacher Award (2012-2015) and was a tenured fellow of the Bruning Teaching Academy (2016-2017). Her research focuses on language understanding, learning and use in bilingual Spanish-English speakers, heritage language speakers and native Spanish and English speakers. Her work has appeared in various journals including Applied English Linguistic Studies (ELIA), Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, Hispania, Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language Sciences, Porta Linguarum, RESLA, Spanish in Context, and The Mental Lexicon. She is on the board of advisors of the ELIA Journal.
Zinny S. Bond, Professor Emerita
Linguistics, College of Arts & Sciences
Zinny (Dzintra) Bond, Professor Emerita, Ohio University, earned a Ph.D. in linguistics, with psychology and hearing and speech sciences as concentrations, from the Ohio State University. She has worked at the University of Alberta, Ohio University, Ohio State University and the Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Her research areas include phonetics, psychology of language, speech perception, and language contact. Currently she is analyzing the pronunciation of Latvian in recordings from WW I. She has published papers in various journals including Jl. of the Acoustical Society of America, Language and Speech, Perception and Psychophysics, and Jl. of Phonetics. She is a member of Acoustical Society of America, Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies, Linguistic Society of America and a foreign member of Latvian Academy of Science.
Purba Das, Professor
Communication Studies, Scripps College of Communications
Purba Das is Professor in Communication Studies at Ohio University. Dr. Das’ research employs a critical approach in the field of intercultural communication in understanding the problems of nations, national identity, race, caste, media, and health narratives in marginalized populations in India and the USA. Dr. Das has published in journals such as Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Journal of Intercultural Communication Research and Asian Journal of Communication. She regularly presents her research at scholarly conferences such as the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association. Dr. Das teaches undergraduate courses in Cross-cultural Communication, Health Communication and Women and Health. She teaches a graduate course in Cross-Cultural Communication. She is also the COMS 1100 course coordinator.
Chao-Yang Lee, Associate Professor
Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences, College of Health Sciences and Professions
Chao-Yang Lee is an Associate Professor of Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences. His research in speech perception focuses on identifying factors contributing to the perception of lexical tones. He teaches courses in phonetics and speech science, and his teaching has been recognized by the University Professor award. He serves as the Director of Studies for the Honors Tutorial College Program in Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences, and an Editor for the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. He received a PhD in cognitive science from Brown University and was a Frederick V. Hunt postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sally A. Marinellie, Associate Professor and IESL Associate Director of Training
Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences, College of Health Sciences and Professions
Sally Marinellie is an associate professor in Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences at Ohio University. She teaches courses in language- literacy connections for speech language pathologists, and her research focuses on school age language development and disorders. Dr. Marinellie currently serves as the senior associate dean in the college of health sciences and professions.
Danny R. Moates, Associate Professor Emeritus
Psychology, College of Arts & Sciences
Danny Moates is Associate Professor Emeritus of Psychology. He was a co-founder (with Z. S. Bond) of the Institute for the Empirical Study of Language and served as its first director. Psycholinguistics is his research area, with special interests in how spoken words are recognized. His work has appeared in the Journal of the Acoustic Society of America and in The Mental Lexicon.
Liang Tao, Professor and IESL Associate Director of Research
Linguistics, College of Arts & Sciences
Liang Tao is professor of Chinese and linguistics at Ohio University. Her research interests include both discourse analysis and psycholinguistics, including language production and processing, second language learning, and grammaticalization through everyday conversations of Mandarin Chinese. She has taught Chinese language at all levels (1-4). Currently, she teaches courses in general linguistics, applied linguistics, and language and culture. She earned her PhD from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she also earned a cognitive science certificate, and worked as a postdoctoral research associate. She has published in journals and book chapters and has co-edited a book on Chinese linguistics.
Li Xu, Professor and IESL Treasurer
Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences, College of Health Sciences and Professions
Li Xu is a Professor of Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences. His research focuses on speech perception and production, pitch perception and vocal singing with cochlear implants. His NIH-funded research explores lexical tone development (e.g., lexical tone perception and production) in prelingually deafened children with cochlear implants. He has published extensively with more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and 14 book chapters. He teaches several graduate courses in Audiology and Neuroscience for both Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology graduate students.
Adjunct Faculty Members
Mary Beaton, Assistant Professor
Modern Languages, Denison University, USA
Mary Beaton is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Denison University. She earned her doctorate in Hispanic Linguistics from the Ohio State University in 2015. Her research interests include phonetics, phonology, and sociolinguistics. She is particularly interested in stigmatized language features and communities that are subject to linguistic discrimination. Her work focuses on Spanish in the Caribbean and the United States and Brazilian Portuguese.
Mark Gibson, Assistant Professor
Linguistics, Universidad de Navarra, Spain
Mark Gibson is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona, Spain. His research focuses on the timing of articulatory gestures and the development of the temporal structures of speech in different populations (including normally developing children, deaf children with cochlear implants, second language speakers and bilingual speakers). He earned his BA and MA at Ohio University before going on to obtain his PhD at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.
Mayuresh Kumar, Assistant Professor
Foreign Languages, Aligarh Muslim University, India
Mayuresh Kumar is an Assistant Professor at the Aligarh Muslim University, India, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Spanish language and literature. One of his core research areas is bilingualism and he has worked primarily on using Hindi to teach Spanish as a foreign language. He has also been involved in various projects and has worked as a Research Assistant for Harvard Business School and Leventhal School of Accounting, USC in the past. His future research interests lie in teaching Spanish and developing resources for it.
Teresa López-Soto, Associate Professor
English Studies, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain
Teresa López-Soto holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics, with specialization in linguistic information into a speech recognizer for a telephone operator dialog system. After a postdoctoral research leave at Indiana University (Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, 2005-2011) she has shifted increasingly to the study of the neuropsychological and cognitive aspects of language acquisition, with special attention to auditory processing and speech perception. She is currently a visiting professor in the Department of Psychiatrics, School of Medicine, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and responsible for the research project “Neuroplasticity after cochlear implantation” at Clinic Hospital San Carlos, Madrid (ENT Unit).
Bobby Luthra-Sinha, Associate Researcher
Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi, India
Bobby Luthra Sinha is affiliated to the Institute of Social Sciences (ISS), Delhi, India. Currently, she is working as a lead researcher and chief advisor for programs as well as learning-and-implementation-oriented projects for NGOs in India. She also holds the position of Deputy Director of the Centre for Asian, African and Latin American Studies (CAALAS) based in the ISS, Delhi and Co-Chair of the International Commission of Migration at the International Union for Anthropological and Ethnographic Sciences (IUAES). She specializes in the comparative study of the politics of Asian, Africa and Latin America and focuses on social and protest movements, specifically on how the language of protest and its communicative methodologies influence the modus operandi, the repertoires as well as the impact and outreach of contentious politics across regions and cultures. Her linguistic observations and curiosities extend to both, -how native groups and communities project (express) themselves in the political and social life of their countries, and - how migrants integrate into places and spaces embedded in foreign languages.
Ariadna Sánchez-Hernández, Assistant Professor and IESL Associate Director of Communications
English Studies, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Ariadna Sánchez-Hernández is an Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). She has international teaching experience in Linguistics (Jaume I University, Leuphana University of Lüneburg) and also in Spanish as a Foreign Language (Shawnee State University, Ohio University). Her research interests include L2 pragmatics and intercultural competence in study-abroad and English-medium education contexts. Her publications include numerous international articles, chapters and books (e.g., Journal of Pragmatics 2018, System 2018, Routledge 2020), and she is a member of the editorial board of Applied Pragmatics and Estudios de Lingüística Inglesa Aplicada (ELIA). Finally, she is the vice-president of the International Association for Teaching Pragmatics (ITAP).
Rajiv Saxena, Professor
Centre of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Latin American Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Rajiv Saxena is Professor and former Chairperson of the Centre of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Latin American Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He was Fulbright Senior Scholar at University of California and Harvard University, USA. Currently, he is Project Director of first Spanish MOOC courses of Government of India and was also principal investigator of first online post graduate courses “Spanish e-PG-Pathshala” under the national mission on education through ICT of Ministry of Education, India. He has more than 140 publications which comprise of 11 books, several research papers in national & international journals. He has presented papers in several conferences in India and abroad.
Alcina Sousa, Tenured Assistant Professor
Faculdade de Artes e Humanidades, Universidade da Madeira, Portugal
Alcina Sousa Is tenured Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Madeira, where she has taught, as course leader, Applied Linguistics (BA), Communication Skills (BA) and Specialized Discourse in English (BA), Pragmatics, Discourse and Cognition (MA), Research Techniques and Methods in Linguistics (MA), with reference to Corpus Linguistics, English for Kids (MA), among other courses. Her main academic interests include discourse analysis, intercultural pragmatics, corpus-based approaches, stylistics and critical and creative reading in a foreign language, linguistics/literature interface, as well as language and identity, on which she has supervised MA and PhD dissertations and done research in national and international projects as well as delivered talks as a visiting scholar worldwide.
Student Members
Grace Engel
Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences, College of Health Sciences and Professions
Grace Engel is a student at Ohio University working on her undergraduate degree in Hearing, Speech, and Language Sciences. Her research interests include origins of modern languages, anatomy of speech mechanisms, and dialect differences among underrepresented groups. After completing the Experimental Study of Language certificate and her undergrad as a whole, Grace plans on attending an MA program for Speech-Language Pathology.
Arushi Gupta
Centre of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Latin American Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Arushi Gupta is currently pursuing her doctoral degree in Spanish from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Her specialization is in foreign language teaching, second language acquisition, CALL, TELL and MALL in India. Her Mphil dissertation focused on the new technology in the form of mobile applications like Duolingo, HelloTalk, Busuu, and Babbel and how they can be incorporated in higher education in India. Her other research interest is cultural studies, where she uses movies and series to teach about discourse, culture and society. For example, for her MA thesis she used Y tu mamá también to understand Mexican societal norms and how these are reflected in and impact language and culture. After completing her doctoral degree, she plans to pursue a career in academia.
Isabelle Leimkuhler
Linguistics & Modern Languages, College of Arts & Sciences
Isabelle Leimkuhler is an undergraduate student at Ohio University triple majoring in Spanish, Linguistics and Music. She is currently working on completing the Latin American Studies Certificate and the Preservice Teacher Preparation in TEFL as well. Isabelle is interested in research topics of Hispanic linguistics, bilingualism, dialectology and second language acquisition. Alongside her academic interests, Isabelle is also a member of the Marching 110 at Ohio University! She plans to continue her studies as a future graduate student in Applied Linguistics and/or Spanish, to earn her TEFL certification and to complete the Experimental Study of Language certificate program.
Guillermo Lira-Contreras
Modern Languages, College of Arts & Sciences
Guillermo Lira Contreras is currently studying for his MA in Spanish at Ohio University. He earned his B.A. from Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro in 2012. He has been a language instructor, as well as a language coordinator for the last 9 years. Guillermo’s interests include morphology, phonology, and historical linguistics. His research focuses on language use in native speakers of Spanish. His current project focuses on the hesitant use of double participles in younger generations in Querétaro, Mexico.