Esther Brown

Esther Brown is a Professor and Department Chair of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado. She specializes in usage-based phonology, language variation, and the linguistic study of New Mexican Spanish. Her research focuses on the interplay between linguistic usage patterns and phonological/morphosyntactic variation across Ibero-Romance languages.

Her work examines phenomena such as inflected infinitives in Galician, pronoun variation in Spanish dialects, and cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speech. She employs corpus-based and experimental methodologies, frequently collaborating with researchers like Javier Rivas and William D. Raymond.

Recent studies investigate how contextual frequency shapes lexical representations, with notable contributions to understanding phonetic reduction mechanisms and morphosyntactic variation in non-finite clauses. Her research bridges theoretical linguistics with empirical sociolinguistic analysis, particularly in understudied dialects like New Mexican and Puerto Rican Spanish.

Laboratory work involves analyzing speech production patterns using acoustic phonetics and computational methods. Ongoing projects explore developmental aspects of morphosyntactic variation in child Spanish speakers and the role of exemplar-based models in capturing language change processes.