Josh L. Higdon

Hello, and welcome to my website! My name is Josh Higdon (she/they pronouns), and I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in Hispanic Lingustics at the University of Florida. I am co-advised by Dr. Jorge Valdés Kroff and Dr. Imanol Suárez-Palma, and I conduct research in the Bilingual Sentence Processing Lab and Computational Linguistics Lab.

My research investigates Spanish heritage speakers and their language processing. I use psycholinguistic methodology (eye-tracking and self-paced listening) to consider how speakers’ linguistic attitudes, exposure and usage of Spanish, and other factors may modulate language production and online processing of particular subsets of the lexicon, like reverse-predicate psychological verbs and (ir)regular verbs in the subjunctive mood. Ultimately, my research attempts to combat deficit-based narratives about Spanish heritage speakers by, instead of highlighting how they may differ from monolingual speakers, emphasizing Spanish heritage speakers’ linguistic capabilities.