Elena Schoonmaker-Gates

Elena Schoonmaker-Gates is an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Elon University, where she has taught since 2012. She serves as Department Chair (2024–present) and previously as Associate Department Chair (2022–2024) and Spanish Major Coordinator (2018–2022). Her academic background includes a Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from Indiana University (2012), an M.A. in Spanish Language and Culture from Middlebury College (2004), and a B.A. in Spanish and French from Bishop’s University (2003).

Her research focuses on Second Language Acquisition and its intersection with sociophonetics, dialect perception, and language pedagogy. Key themes include the role of phonological variation in L2 learning, regional dialect exposure, and the impact of social factors on pronunciation development.

Recent publications highlight trends in dialect-specific sociophonetic perceptual learning, foreign accent perception through phonetic cues like VOT, and the influence of study abroad environments on learners’ dialectal competence. Her work bridges theoretical linguistics and practical language education.

She has led grants such as the CATL Co-Scholar project on machine translation with student partners (2022–2024) and actively mentors student research in Spanish linguistics.