Research

My research program focuses on phonology and second language acquisition, more specifically on stress and prosody, and how subtle patterns in language can be acquired by speakers and second language learners. My doctoral thesis explored how syllable weight impacts word stress, and how native speakers acquire and generalize stress patterns present in their language.

I’m the author of Data visualization and analysis in second language research, a book focused on statistical methods applied to second language acquisition data using R. Quantitative methods play a central role in my research program, given my interest in subtle linguistic patterns.

I am involved in different projects as a member of the Second Language Acquisition Group in the Department of Linguistics at McGill. Two such projects are connected to a) high vowel deletion in Québec French (with Natália B. Guzzo and Heather Goad), and b) the role of prosody in pronoun interpretation in English (with Heather Goad, Lydia White and colleagues). Finally, I’m also working on the perception of affrication and aspiration in English-L2 (with Natália B. Guzzo) and on sonority-driven stress (with Kevin Ryan).

Below you can access my full CV as well as some selected publications and conference presentations. All of my publications are open access via preprints on OSF .

Main projects in progress

Sonority-driven stress (with Kevin Ryan)
Loanword adaptation in Brazilian Portuguese English (with Natália B. Guzzo)
L3 acquisition of Portuguese [Mandarin L1 English L2] (with Chao Zhou)
Metrical feet in English and Portuguese (with Heather Goad)
Talian corpus (Brazilian Veneto; with Natália B. Guzzo)

Virtually all of my publications, including conference presentations (posters and slides), can be accessed from my CV in PDF format.

Selected funding

Insight Development Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canada.
- Period: 2024–2026.
- Title: The role of lexical and post-lexical statistics in second language acquisition.
- Amount: CAD 55,559.00
Postdoctoral fellowship, Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), Québec. Declined by candidate.¹
- Period: 2018–2020.
- Institution: Harvard University
- Title: Enquête sur les limites à l’acquisition phonologique.
- Amount: CAD 64,000.00
PhD fellowship, Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), Québec.
- Period: 2015–2017.
- Institution: McGill University
- Title: L’acquisition de l’accent et de la gradience du poids syllabique.
- Amount: CAD 46,666.00
WYNG Trust Award, Faculty of Arts (2013)
- Institution: McGill University
- Amount: CAD 10,000.00
Graduate Excellence Fellowship (2012)
- Institution: McGill University
- Amount: CAD 9,000.00

PhD thesis

Garcia, G. D. (2017). Weight effects on stress: lexicon and grammar [Doctoral dissertation, McGill University].

Selected publications

Book

Garcia, G. D. (2021). Data visualization and analysis in second language research. New York, NY: Routledge.

Journal articles

Garcia, G. D. & H. Goad. (2024). Weight effects and the parametrization of the foot: English versus Portuguese. Laboratory Phonology, 15(1): 1–37.
Guzzo, N. B & G. D. Garcia. (2021). Gradience in prosodic representation: vowel reduction and neoclassical elements in Brazilian Portuguese. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 6(1): 1–26.
Garcia, G. D. (2020). Language transfer and positional bias in English stress. Second Language Research, 36(4):445–474.
Garcia, G. D. (2019). When lexical statistics and the grammar conflict. Language, 95(4):612–641.
Garcia, G. D. (2017). Weight gradience and stress in Portuguese. Phonology, 34(1):41–79.

Proceedings and chapters

Garcia, G. D. (2024). Current issues in Portuguese main and secondary stress. In The Routledge Handbook of Portuguese Phonology, ed. André Zampaulo, pp. 115-141. London: Routledge.
Garcia, G. D. (2023). Statistical modelling in L3/Ln acquisition. In The Cambridge Handbook of Third Language Acquisition (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics), ed. Jennifer Cabrelli, Adel Chaouch-Orozco, Jorge González Alonso, Sergio M. Pereira Soares, Eloi Puig-Mayenco, and Jason Rothman, pp. 744-770. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Guzzo, N. B., H. Goad & G. D. Garcia. (2018). What motivates high vowel deletion in Québec French: foot structure or tonal profile? In Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 3(1), 11:1–10.
Garcia, G. D. (2017). Grammar trumps lexicon: Typologically inconsistent patterns are not generalized. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, ed. Andrew Lamont and Katerina Tezloff, volume 2, pp. 25–34. Amherst, MA: Graduate Linguistics Student Association (GLSA), University of Massachusetts.
Garcia, G. D., H. Goad & N. B. Guzzo. (2017). Footing is not always about stress: Formalizing variable high vowel deletion in Québec French. In Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology, 4, ed. Karen Jesney, Charlie O’Hara, Caitlin Smith, and Rachel Walker. Linguistic Society of America.
Garcia, G. D., H. Goad & N. B. Guzzo. (2017). L2 acquisition of high vowel deletion in Quebec French. In Proceedings of the 41st Annual Boston Conference on Language Development, ed. Maria LaMendola and Jennifer Scott, pp. 273–282. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Garcia, G. D. (2016). The computation of weight in Portuguese: syllables and intervals. In Proceedings of the 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. Kyeong-min Kim, Pocholo Umbal, Trevor Block, Queenie Chan, Tanie Cheng, Kelli Finney, Mara Katz, Sophie Nickel-Thompson, and Lisa Shorten, pp. 137–145. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Selected Peer-Reviewed Conference Presentations

Guzzo, N. B. & G. D. Garcia (2024). Marginal representations in loanword adaptation: affrication in Brazilian Portuguese English. The 54th Meeting of the North East Linguistics Society (NELS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA, Jan 26–28. Acceptance rate: 7.8% (talk)
Garcia, G. D. & H. Goad (2023). The plausibility of feet in two stress languages. The 30th Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm), University of Manchester, Manchester, UK, May 25–27 (talk)
Garcia, G. D. & N. B. Guzzo. (2021). Target vowel asymmetry in Brazilian Veneto metaphony. The 51st Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA, Apr 29–May 1st. Acceptance rate: 40% (talk)
Garcia, G. D. (2021). Binary rhythm and syllable weight in Portuguese. The 95th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA Meeting), San Francisco, USA, Jan 7–10. Acceptance rate: 35.2% (talk)
Garcia, G. D. (2020). Variable secondary stress and weight-sensitivity in Portuguese. The Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS), University of California, Berkeley, USA, Feb 7–8. Acceptance rate: 26% (talk)
Garcia, G. D. & H. Goad. (2018). Feet are parametric—even in languages with stress. The 49th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS), Cornell University, Ithaca, USA, Oct 5–7. Acceptance rate: 13% (talk)
Garcia, G. D. (2018). When transfer fails: positional bias and weight-sensitivity in English stress. The 8th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA), Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, Sep 27–30. (talk)
Garcia, G. D. & H. Goad. (2018). Can you have stress without feet? The 36th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL), University of California, Los Angeles, USA, Apr 20–22. Acceptance rate: 28% (poster)
Garcia, G. D. (2018). Regulating the interaction between lexical statistics and the grammar: a naturalness bias in learning weight. The 41st Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW), Budapest, Hungary, Apr 10–14. Acceptance rate: 17% (poster)
Garcia, G. D. (2018). The advantages of Bayesian statistics in the study of second language acquisition. The 2018 conference of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), Chicago, USA, Mar 24–27. Acceptance rate: 47% (talk)
Guzzo, N. B., H. Goad & G. D. Garcia. (2018). What motivates high vowel deletion in Québec French: foot structure or tonal profile? The 92nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA Meeting), Salt Lake City, USA, Jan 4–7. Acceptance rate: 28% (talk)
Garcia, G. D., H. Goad & N. B. Guzzo. (2016). Footing is not always about stress: formalizing variable high vowel deletion in Québec French. The Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP), University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, Oct 21–23. Acceptance rate: 14.2% (talk)
Garcia, G. D. (2016). Grammar trumps lexicon: typologically inconsistent weight effects are not generalized. The 47th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS), University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, Oct 14–16. Acceptance rate: 12% (talk)
Garcia, G. D. (2016). Computing segmental and suprasegmental information in lexical decision. The 24th Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm), University of Manchester, Manchester, UK, May 26–28. (talk)
Garcia, G. D. (2015). Stress and gradient weight in Portuguese. The 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL), Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, Mar 27–29. Acceptance rate: 16% (talk)

Footnotes

Declined due to tenure-track offer at Ball State University in 2017.↩︎