About

Nicholas Henriksen is a faculty member in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. His research engages with topics at the phonetics-phonology interface, focusing on questions such as whether language users hold abstract, non-surface true representations of sounds and the extent to which phonetic detail is part of phonological grammar or speakers' knowledge. His early work concentrated on question intonation within the autosegmental-metrical framework, and he has recently explored sound change in sub-varieties of Andalusian Spanish spoken in southern Spain. Henriksen has also initiated a large-scale collaborative research project titled "From Africa to Patagonia: Voices of Displacement," which examines the linguistic features of Afrikaans-Spanish bilinguals in Patagonia, Argentina, involving nearly 50 collaborators. He has published extensively in prominent journals and co-edited a volume on intonational grammar in Ibero-Romance languages. In 2021, he was awarded the Linguistic Society of America's Early Career Award.

Research topics

• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• History
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Anatomy
• Medicine
• Acoustics
• Physics
• Demography
• Ethnology
• Gender studies
• Speech recognition
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Cross-language interactions of phonetic and phonological processes

  Studies in Second Language Acquisition · 2025-01-30

  articleOpen access

  Abstract This paper explores how long-term bilingualism affects the production of intervocalic plosive consonants (/p t k b d ɡ/) in the speech of Afrikaans–Spanish bilinguals from Patagonia, Argentina. We performed sociolinguistic interviews with three speaker groups: L1-Afrikaans/L2-Spanish bilinguals (14 speakers, interviewed separately in Spanish and Afrikaans), L1-Spanish comparison speakers from Patagonia (10 speakers), and L1-Afrikaans comparison speakers from South Africa (11 speakers). We analyzed the speech data using three acoustic measures (constriction duration, relative intensity, and percent voicing) to examine the degree of lenition of the target plosives. The results demonstrate a complex interplay of factors that bring about cross-language influence, which varies based on the target phoneme and phonetic measure. Notably, the findings suggest that phenomena that are gradient phonetic processes in both languages of bilingual speakers (such as the lenition of voiceless plosives in Spanish and Afrikaans) pattern differently than phenomena that are phonological in one language but phonetic in the other (such as lenition of voiced plosives in Spanish versus Afrikaans).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Beyond <i>Distinción</i> : Media, Identity, and the Strategic Use of /s/ and /θ/ in Andalusian Spanish

  Journal of Sociolinguistics · 2025-09-14

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Third‐wave sociolinguistics emphasizes speakers’ agentive roles in leveraging linguistic variation to construct and reinforce social identities. The present study examines how speakers of Andalusian Spanish navigate sociolinguistic variables, with a particular focus on mediatized contexts. We analyze variation between the /s/ and /θ/ phonemes in the speech of Joaquín Sánchez Rodríguez, a prominent Andalusian athlete and media figure. Drawing on 66 YouTube videos across formal and informal settings, we analyze how Joaquín navigates between the three reference systems associated with /s/~/θ/ usage ( distinción , ceceo , seseo ). We show that linguistic “scripts” privileging distinción create conditions for identity work through marked features like ceceo and seseo . Rather than merely imposing constraints, however, these scripts paradoxically augment the indexical potential of marked variants, fostering a dynamic interplay between agency and structure in public discourse. Finally, this study challenges claims that social meaning primarily attaches to phonetic elements rather than phonological relations.

  PublisherDOI

• Exploring the linguistics and social perceptions of Andalusian Spanish

  Research Features · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Laxing Vowel Harmony

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-10-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter sets out to review multiple cases of the phenomenon known as laxing harmony—that is, an assimilation process in which two nearby vowels are produced having an identical tense/lax quality. First, the chapter distinguishes between laxing harmony and advanced tongue root (ATR) harmony, limiting the scope of laxing harmony to language varieties for which the tense/lax distinction is otherwise not phonemic. It then moves on to discuss the current understanding of why and how laxing harmony occurs, summarizing research on three key examples: Eastern Andalusian Spanish, Laurentian French, and Cantabrian Spanish. Finally, it offers ideas for future empirical work regarding production and perception.

  PublisherDOI

• Sound change in Western Andalusian Spanish: Investigation into the actuation and propagation of post-aspiration

  Journal of Phonetics · 2023 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Acoustics
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• Perceptions of regional origin and social attributes of phonetic variants used in Iberian Spanish

  Journal of Linguistic Geography · 2023-09-22 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Sociodemographic information, such as a speaker’s regional origin, is intimately related to the judgments and social evaluations that listeners assign to that speaker. This association between linguistic form and social information can also lead to linguistic profiling, a harmful form of discrimination. The present study examines the geographic classifications and social attitudes attributed to ten phonetic variants used within regional varieties of Iberian (i.e., European) Spanish. We are specifically interested in understanding listeners’ geographical classifications and language attitudes held toward Andalusian Spanish, which is a less privileged regional variety spoken in Spain’s southern region, as compared to north-central Peninsular Spanish (NCPS). The results of an online survey show that 165 listeners were fairly consistent when geographically classifying Andalusian-sounding stimuli as originating from the south of Spain. Importantly, the respondents also attributed less favorable social meaning to the Andalusian-sounding stimuli in comparison to the NCPS-sounding stimuli. We link the findings to broader themes in sociolinguistics, such as language-based discrimination, linguistic insecurity, and the social motivations of language change.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sociophonetic Investigation of the Spanish Alveolar Trill /r/ in Two Canonical-Trill Varieties

  Language and Speech · 2022-12-27 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The "hyper-variation" present in rhotic sounds makes them particularly apt for sociophonetic research. This paper investigates the variable realization of the voiced alveolar-trill phoneme /r/ through an acoustic analysis of unscripted speech produced by 80 speakers of Spanish. Although the most common phonetic variant of /r/ contained two lingual constrictions, we find substantial inter-speaker variation in our data, ranging from zero to five lingual contacts. The results demonstrate that the variation in Spanish results from a systematic interaction of factors, deriving from well-documented processes of consonantal lenition (e.g., weakening in unstressed syllables) in addition to processes inherent to the trill's articulation (e.g., high-vowel antagonism). Importantly, speaker sex displayed the strongest effect among all the predictors, which leads us to consider the role of sociolinguistic factors, in addition to possible biomechanical differences, on /r/ production. We contextualize the findings within a literature that theorizes rhotic consonants as a single class of sounds despite remarkable patterns of cross-language and speaker-specific variation.

  PublisherDOI

• Sound change and gender-based differences in isolated regions: acoustic analysis of intervocalic phonemic stops by Bora-Spanish bilinguals

  Linguistics Vanguard · 2022-06-17 · 1 citations

  article

  Abstract This study examines Spanish phonemic stops in the speech of 15 ethnically Bora bilinguals (8 males, 7 females) living in the Peruvian Amazon, within the broader context of examining gender-based phonetic variation in small speech communities. We target pronunciation of intervocalic phonemic /p t k b d g/ extracted from sociolinguistic interviews. The acoustic analysis focuses on consonant duration and relative intensity of each target phoneme. The results reveal clear gender-based variation, with males adopting more lenited variants of certain phonemic stops than females. We discuss these findings in light of gender-based research on phonetic variation in communities undergoing sound change. More generally, our study contributes to the literature on language variation and societal contacts in small speech communities in Amazonia.

  PublisherDOI

• 14 Second and third language acquisition of Romance phonology

  2021-11-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter synthesizes research on the second (L2) and third (L3) language acquisition of phonological structures across the Romance languages. First, the chapter offers an overview of models of L2 and L3 acquisition that account for the myriad cross-language influences observed in phonological acquisition. Next, these models are applied to numerous studies on Romance-language phonological acquisition. These studies provide a diverse corpus in terms of investigational techniques, theoretical approaches, areas of linguistic study, language pairings, and the language levels of individual learners. Specifically, the chapter offers information on the L2/ L3 acquisition of Catalan, French, Galician, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The majority of research derives from L2 segmental acquisition; when possible, information is offered on L3 acquisition, and on suprasegmental acquisition. Altogether, the collective body of work covered here can be viewed as a resource in the study of L2/L3 Romance-language acquisition and cross-language phonological influence.

  PublisherDOI

• Exploring language dominance through code-switching: intervocalic voiced stop lenition in Afrikaans–Spanish bilinguals

  Phonetica · 2021 · 11 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  • Philosophy

  The present study examines the relationship between the two grammars of bilingual speakers, the linguistic ecologies in which the L1 and L2 become active, and how these topics can be explored in a bilingual community undergoing L1 attrition. Our experiment focused on the production of intervocalic phonemic voiced stops for L1-Afrikaans/L2-Spanish bilinguals in Patagonia, Argentina. While these phonemes undergo systematic intervocalic lenition in Spanish (e.g., /b d ɡ/ > [β ð ɣ]), they do not in Afrikaans (e.g., /b d/ > [b d]). The bilingual participants in our study produced target Afrikaans and Spanish words in unilingual and code-switched speaking contexts. The results show that: (i) the participants produce separate phonetic categories in Spanish and Afrikaans; (ii) code-switching affects the production of the target sounds asymmetrically, such that L1 Afrikaans influences the production of L2 Spanish sounds but not vice versa; and (iii) this L1-to-L2 influence remains robust despite the instability of the L1 itself. Altogether, our findings speak to the persistence of a bilingual's L1 phonological grammar despite cross-generational L1 attrition.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lorenzo García‐Amaya

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  8 shared

• Andries W. Coetzee

  7 shared

• Micha Fischer

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  6 shared

• Amber Galvano

  University of California, Berkeley

  4 shared

• Meghan E. Armstrong

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  3 shared

• Stephen Fafulas

  University of Mississippi

  3 shared

• Kimberly L. Geeslin

  Indiana University

  2 shared

• Daan Wissing

  2 shared

Labs

• Romance Languages and LiteraturesPI

Awards & honors

• 2021, awarded the Linguistic Society of America's Early Care…