Gemma Repiso-Puigdelliura is an early-career researcher (PhD awarded 2021) with extensive research experience in the speech production of child and adult bilinguals. She holds a position as a Professora Lectora at the Univeristat Autònoma de Barcelona and is an active member of the established UAB Linguistics Research Group (SGR 00787).  As an emerging researcher, her academic output includes 9 articles in peer-reviewed journals, 8 of which have been published in top-tier Q1 journals (according to Web of Science), 3 conference proceedings, and 1 book chapter. Her work is centered around the question of language transfer in speech systems of early bilinguals. In particular, the novelty of her work resides in directly comparing the grammars of child and adult bilingual speakers. She has examined a wide variety of speech sounds (e.g., rhotics, glottal stops, palatal fricatives, mid vowels) and phonological processes (e.g., resyllabification, tapping, rises in intontationl contours). Her research highlights the fact that language contact phenomena are multifaceted and must be understood both as a change motivated by acquisitional constraints and by attrition of the first language due to systematic exposure to a second language.

Repiso-Puigdelliura shows a track record of attracting funding. Her doctoral dissertation was supported by a U.S. National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. During her time at McMaster University, she obtained two pre-competitive grants from McMaster University in collaboration with the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and was awarded competitive Insight Development Grant from SSHRC (declined due to change of institutions). Since her tenure at the UAB, she has been awarded a pre-competitive project by the same university that she leads together with emerging and established scholars in the field of bilingualism (Sílvia Perpiñán, Adriana Soto, Miquel Llompart PI2).

Her research output is evidence that she has developed an international network of collaborators. In collaboration with Ji Young Kim, she has studied factors predicting differences in Spanish heritage bilingual grammars. In collaboration with Hironori Katsuda (University of Kansas) and Kie Zuraw (UCLA) she is currently modeling phonological processes in code-switched grammars. Together with Daniel Pape she has recently studied the effects of individual differences in autistic-like traits on the expression of prosodic focus.

She is currently co-organizing New Sounds 2025, a leading conference in the field of bilingual speech sounds, for which she obtained a Connection Grant 2024 as an international collaborator from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant.

In order to provide educators and speech language therapists tools to assess typical language development Repiso-Puigdelliura currently collaborates with a network of researchers on the development of a battery of vocabulary tests that will assess vocabulary development in Catalan in children and adults (LexiCat). The project has been awarded with an Industry and Knowledge Seed Grant from the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR)

Repiso-Puigdelliura is currently supervising a PhD thesis by Yinuo Wei in collaboration with Adriana Soto on the development of trilingual linguistic abilities in school age Mandarin-Catalan-Spanish-English multilinguals. At McMaster University, together with Daniel Pape, she is supervising an MA thesis by Anthony Principe on the acquisition of rhotic sounds by Italian heritage speakers. At McMaster University, she served as a committee member for Ph.D. Comprehensive Exams (1), Master’s oral exam member (3), and as a Master’s oral exam chair. Under her supervision, the student Tienna Nagel obtained 7,500CAD in research funds for a project on trill development in heritage speakers (Summer 2023).

She has also extensive experience training research assistants in data transcription and data annotation. She allocated $6,242 of the NSF grant and over 6,000 CAD of the McMaster University-internal SSHRC grants to undergraduate students’ salaries. In addition, she is currently supervising two research assistants (an MA student and an undergraduate student) at the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica at the UAB.