Welcome
Thank you for visiting my academic webpage!
I am a doctoral student in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of North Carolina. Bilingualism, language contact, language planning, and language acquisition are my primary academic interests. After having the opportunities to work in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, and to develop a career stateside in secondary education, I am pursuing a doctorate to investigate questions in Galician sociolinguistics, language planning and language contact.
Additionally, I work at UNC in the Export Compliance Office and the Office of Ethics and Policy.
Outside of research and work, I enjoy being outside. I garden (to various degrees of success…), hike, cycle, enjoy board games, and drink a lot of coffee!
I appreciate meeting researchers with similar interests. Feel free to contact me at brent.eisenbarth@unc.edu.
My MA thesis suggests that learners acquire articulatory gestures more accurately when and where the gesture is more visually salient. In the project, Reading Lips and Learning Sounds: The Effect of Visual Cue Saliency on Phonological Production in a Second-Language, 10 Italian learners read an Italian short story, and subsequent word list, modified to include singleton and geminate minimal pairs of intervocalic voiceless labial and velar stops (/p/ – /pp/ vs. /k/ – /kk/). Research on visual cues demonstrates gemination does contain visual information, and it is believed that the labial position is more visually salient than other places of production.
Intermediate and advanced participants were found to produce more distinct labial pairs than velar pairs, and this asymmetry is most pronounced in advanced participants. This thesis continues to contextualize this finding among L2 production data from other visible and non-visible visual cues.
In my role in the Export Compliance Office and the Office of Ethics and Policy, I strive to support the office’s operational functions. I am particularly keen on delivering direct, operational, clear training modules and materials. To this end, I coordinate with the Service Center for Excellence’s instructional design experts.
Having worked in the Galician education system, on exchange, and in US world language education, I am a vocal advocate for centering language access in discussions of equity. In the United States context, the growing research on Heritage Language Acquisition is critical to better support our ESL students in the world language classroom.
The Galician sociolinguistic landscape is complex, with questions surrounding dialectology and standardization, how Galician is presented relative to Portuguese, and the role of educational institutions in language planning. I seek to study this topic further during my doctoral coursework and to develop a dissertation in this field.