Ji Young Kim

Associate Professor
Department: Spanish and Portuguese
jiyoungkim@ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Language, Language Proficiency, Linguistics

Ji Young Kim joined the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA in 2016 after completing her Ph.D. in Spanish Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in heritage language phonology. Her research focuses on how Spanish heritage speakers in the US — descendants of Hispanic immigrants, who are early bilingual speakers of Spanish (an ethnic minority language) and English (the majority language of the society) — perceive and produce the speech sounds in Spanish, when language shift to English is prominent across the generations. She is currently investigating the phonetic features of “heritage accent” in heritage speakers’ speech, which is often perceived by monolingual native speakers, but the source of which is very difficult to identify. Moreover, as there is a large variation among Spanish heritage speakers with regard to their identity as Latinos/as in the US and their attitudes toward learning Spanish, her goal is to explore more deeply into the role of various extra-linguistic factors in the development of heritage speakers’ phonological system.