Laura Catharine Smith — Assistant Professor
German Studies

Contact Information

Office: 3109 JFSB

Phone: 422-3513

Email: laurasmith@byu.edu

Commonly Taught Courses German 215: Linguistics Research and Writing
German 310: Phonetics and Pronunciation of German
German 450: History of the German Language
German 460: Structure of Modern German
German 497: Senior Seminar in German (Topics from Historical Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition)

Semester Schedule: Sprechstunden: Mo Mi 1-2, Do 10-10:50

German 344: Phonetics of German
German 445: Linguistics Research and Writing
German 460: Structure of Modern German

Degrees: BA (Hons), Queen's U. at Kingston, Language and Linguistics, 1994
BEducation, Queen's U. at Kingston, French and History/Social Sciences, 1995
MA, U. of Calgary, Historical Linguistics, 1997
MA, U. of Wisconsin-Madison, Linguistics, 2000
Joint PhD, U. of Wisconsin-Madison, Germanic Linguistics and Theoretical Linguistics, 2004

Interests: Historical Linguistics-Prosodic phonology and morphology especially focussing on the role of prosodic templates shaping the history of the Germanic languages; Second Language Perception and Pronunciation, the role of dialect in second language perception and production; Language Acquisition on Study Abroad (grammatical, pronunciation and vocabulary gains, cultural attitudes); Factors affecting native speaker judgments