Kaylyn Blair

Kaylyn graduated from UMass in 2016 with a B.A. in Spanish. Born and raised in Massachusetts, she has now returned to SpanPort at UMass Amherst as a Ph.D. student in Hispanic Linguistics after spending 5+ years in Colorado. She earned her M.A. in Spanish with a concentration in Linguistics from University of Colorado Denver in 2020.  Her research interests include second language acquisition, heritage language acquisition, dialectology, and phonetics. Through her master's degree program, she contributed to research on the impact of pronunciation instruction on introductory L2 learners. She has presented her work at professional conferences on second language acquisition and phonetics. She has also published her work on pronunciation differences of heritage speakers of Spanish and the sociolinguistic factors that may contribute to various realizations of the same phoneme, including languages in contact, levels of input, and generational shift while taking lexical effects into account. Kaylyn is particularly interested in the intersection of SLA, study abroad programming, and career development with the goal of supporting students to not only acquire Spanish as a second language in a meaningful and authentic way, but also to apply that linguistic knowledge and development to professional pursuits and advocate for more bilingualism in the workplace and the world at large.