María R. Brea-Spahn received her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of South Florida in May of 2009. Between the years 2008 and 2010, she served as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech and Theatre and the Department of Education’s new Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Literacy Studies at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). During her stay at MTSU, Maria taught a variety of courses in language and literacy development. She also actively served in departmental and community-based committees, peer-reviewed scholarly journal publications, and co-authored two publications that will be in print late in the year 2010. Maria’s research efforts have focused on the study of how language-specific knowledge supports individuals’ decisions about or their production of sounds within novel words their language(s). An aspect of language-specific experience that was of interest in her research was the frequency of occurrence sound sequences within Spanish, a previously unanalyzed variable in the psycholinguistic literature. Specifically, her research suggested that frequency of occurrence of a specific sound structure (e.g., the ‘ñe’ in the made-up word cliñe) affected: (a) the degree to which adults accepted it as a possible word in Spanish and (b) the accuracy with which children repeated it. Her more recent work continues in this line of research but now also incorporates a preliminary look at the neurophysiological bases of Spanish-specific sound-structure awareness (Brea-Spahn & Magne, in progress). Specifically, this study investigates whether there are measurable differences in the electrophysiological behavior of monolingual English- and Spanish-English bilingual adult listeners when Spanish made-up words that vary in length in syllables and stress pattern are used as stimuli. The Event-Related Potentials (ERP) method, which consists of averaging together portions of the Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal time-locked to repeated presentations of a stimulus, will be used for this purpose. The adults in this study are being asked to decide whether or not the made-up words could possibly be real words in Spanish. This study was awarded an internal research award, the Faculty Creative and Research Activity Committee grant at MTSU.
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