Ji Young Kim

Ji Young Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA's College of Letters and Science, specializing in heritage language phonology. Her research examines Spanish heritage speakers in the United States, focusing on perception and production of speech sounds amid language shift to English.

Her primary research interests include heritage language phonology, bilingual speech perception, phonetic variation in heritage speakers, and the intersection of Latine/x/a/o identity with language attitudes. She investigates how extra-linguistic factors influence phonological development in heritage speakers, particularly examining the elusive 'heritage accent' through prosodic and segmental analysis.

Her publication trends reveal deep engagement with heritage speaker phonetics across multiple dimensions: prosodic features (lexical stress, uptalk, focus marking), segmental production (trills, taps, palatal obstruents), and methodological innovations in linguistic landscape analysis. Recent work increasingly incorporates individual differences (autism quotient scores) and sociolinguistic frameworks to explain variation.

Kim teaches graduate courses including SPAN202A Phonology, SPAN209 Spanish Dialectology, and multiple heritage language phonology seminars, alongside undergraduate courses on Spanish varieties and linguistic landscapes.