Daidone Wins Fulbright Research Award

Associate professor of Spanish and linguistics Dr. Danielle Daidone has been chosen for a Fulbright Postdoctoral Research Award, through which she’ll be researching second language acquisition in Barcelona in the spring 2026 semester.

Daidone’s research project, “Learning Similar-Sounding Words in a Second Language: A Help or a Hindrance?” will analyze how bilingual Spanish and Catalan learners perceive different sounds in English and how that perception influences their acquisition of English words.

“We know vocabulary size matters, but what about your vocabulary makes a difference?” she explained as the crux of the study. “If you learn a lot of words that sound very close to each other, does that help you notice how they are different? Or does that only confuse you?”

Having already collaborated with a colleague at the University of Barcelona while in graduate school, Daidone said the city is known for a broad research group studying second language phonology, the way people learn the sounds of a second language.

Daidone will be the first World Languages and Cultures faculty member to receive a Fulbright award while at UNCW, and the project will be her first in-depth language research opportunity in Spain.

“This is a chance to also learn some Catalan, which I don’t know at all, and to learn more about Spain,” she said.

In her Hispanic linguistics and phonetics courses, Daidone teaches about regional variation in dialects, and she has studied abroad in several South American countries. On top of the opportunity to be immersed in Spanish in an entirely new setting, she’s looking forward to the chance to take dance classes in the local community.