Bio

Julia Alexandrakis is a fourth-year PhD student in Linguistics at Georgetown University, in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her research focuses on phonetics and phonology in relation to factors such as Catalan-Spanish bilingualism, language acquisition and the impact of dialectal variation in Catalan.

Her journey with Catalan began two years ago, largely thanks to her mentors in the programme. Since then, she has developed a great interest in the Catalan language, linguistics and culture. In the spring of 2026, she presented part of her research at the North American Catalan Society (NACS) congress, held in Buffalo, NY.

Project

At Faberllull, she will work on a project aimed at analysing the perception and production of vowels in Catalan. Specifically, it aims to examine the relationship between perception and production in Catalan–Spanish bilingual individuals. The analysis will be carried out considering various factors, such as the distinction between stressed and unstressed vowels, the dialectal variation between Barcelona and the Terres de l'Ebre, acquisition factors (such as linguistic dominance and linguistic background) and input patterns analysed through social network analysis. The research also seeks to understand to what extent the perception of vowels can predict production patterns.