Rate My Professor Michael Shelton

Michael Shelton is Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and French Studies at Occidental College, where he joined the faculty in 2007. He holds a B.S. from St. Cloud State University and M.A. and Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University. A linguist specializing in phonology and psycholinguistics, Shelton employs experimental approaches to investigate the cognitive representation of phonological structure and language processing, with a focus on Spanish. His research explores phonotactic patterns, the interaction of stress and syllable structure among monolingual and bilingual speakers, gradience in phonotactic representation, syllable weight, Spanish rhotics, the role of written accent marks in visual word recognition, and psycholinguistic models of speech production and visual word recognition. He uses behavioral methods to examine possible and impossible sound sequences in Spanish, shedding light on how the mind stores, accesses, and processes phonological knowledge.

Shelton teaches courses in Spanish language, Hispanic linguistics, and general linguistics, including Introduction to Linguistics (Linguistics 301), syntax, morphology, phonology, phonetics, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, psycho- and neurolinguistics, and historical linguistics. He also chairs the Group Language major and the Human Subjects Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Occidental College, and has served as an elected member of the Faculty Council and Academic Planning Committee. Affiliated with the Linguistics program, Cognitive Science department, and Latino/a and Latin American Studies, Shelton's publications include "On the role of the written accent mark in visual word recognition in Spanish" (2021), "The Delayed Naming Task, Phonological Preparation Time, and the Three-syllable Stress Window in Spanish" (2019), "Syllable weight in monolingual and heritage Spanish" (2018), "Metalinguistic Intuitions and Dominant Language Transfer in Heritage Spanish Syllabification" (2017), "Spanish Rhotics: More Evidence of Gradience in the System" (2013), "The interaction of subsyllabic encoding and stress assignment: A new examination of an old problem in Spanish" (2012), "The Syllabification of the Spanish On-Glide: A Behavioral Study" (2012), "How Spanish phonotactics informs psycholinguistic models of speech production" (2010), and "Proscriptions…Gaps…and Something in Between: An Experimental Examination of Spanish Phonotactics" (2009). His scholarship has garnered over 50 citations.