Research

My Research

My research is centered in sociolinguistics and morphosyntactic variation, exploring why, when, where, and how of variable language patterns. My work is grounded in several core principles:

  • Grammar emerges from contexts of use.
  • Language is inherently variable, and predictors of variation are probabilistic.
  • Language is social and subject to ideological and social constraints.
  • Language relies on human cognition and is conditioned by domain-general cognitive processes.
To the end of investigating linguistic, social, and cognitive constraints on variable language patterns, I utilize experimental and production-based methods of investigation, including corpus-based methods, social perception experiments, sociolinguistic interviews, and more.

Research

Recent Publications

Durand López, E. M. & K. V. Dickinson (2025). Gender-inclusive morphology in Spanish: Learnability, processing costs, and use. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 18(2), 391–424.

Dickinson, K. V., L. Lamberti, & S. Schwenter (2025). Evaluating the form of third-person anaphoric direct objects in Portuguese: A cross-dialectal study. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 24(1).

Dickinson, K. V. (2024). Regularization and innovation: A usage-based approach to past participle variation in Brazilian Portuguese. Languages, 9(2), 52.

Dickinson, K. V. (2023). What does it meme? English–Spanish codeswitching and enregisterment in virtual social space. Languages, 8(4), 231.

Dickinson, K. V., P. A. Ortiz-Ramírez, A. Arrieta-Zamudio, J. Grinstead, & B. Flores-Ávalos (2023). Overt subject pronoun use in switch-reference contexts in child Spanish DLD: A discriminant function analysis. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 2, 605–619.

For a complete list of publications and presentations, see Curriculum Vitae.