Meghan Armstrong

she/her

Associate Professor, Unit Director & Spanish Program Director 

Director, Spanish & Health Certificate 

Faculty
photo of Meghan Armstrong, Unit Director
Contact
Email
Email
Location
420 Herter Hall

Professional Bio

Meghan Armstrong is Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at UMass Amherst. She has worked extensively on intonational meaning in Spanish, English and Catalan in both adult and child speech. Her work has traditionally focused on the role of intonation in conveying and perceiving mental states, and how children learn to connect intonational forms with their meanings. 

Professor Armstrong joined UMass Amherst in 2013. She received her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio in 2012. Meghan spent the last two years of her doctoral work at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Catalonia. 

Professor Armstrong's most recent work involves how caretakers and children interact, through a decolonial lens. She is part of the core faculty for the Graduate Certificate in Decolonial Studies. 

RESEARCH AREAS

  • Prosody

  • Caretaker/child interactions

     

 

PUBLICATIONS

Recent Publications

  • Vanrell, M. del M., Armstrong, M., Castroviejo, E., Mayol, L., & Mañas Navarrete, I. (2025). Children’s Comprehension of Evidentiality Through Intonation in Majorcan Catalan. First Language, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01427237251357668
  • Masis, T., Eggleston, C., Green, L. J., Jones, T., Armstrong, M. & O'Connor, B., (2023) “Investigating Morphosyntactic Variation in African American English on Twitter”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 6(1), 392-393. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/zdg0-0914
  • Armstrong M. Children's epistemic inferences through modal verbs and prosody. J Child Lang. 2020 Nov;47(6):1132-1169. doi: 10.1017/S0305000919000916. Epub 2020 Mar 20. PMID: 32195645.

 

AY25-26 COURSES

Fall 2025: SPAN382 Spanish in the U.S. 

Spring 2026: SPAN691S Spanish Intonation