Ximena Echevarría Verástegui (Peru)
I grew up in Peru, a country with remarkable cultural and linguistic diversity, which inspired me to pursue an undergraduate degree in Linguistics at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.
From early on in my career, I had the opportunity to study advanced modules in indigenous languages and their effects in the variations of Spanish and worked with digital methods to preserve and celebrate their heritage. Thanks to a scholarship granted by my university, I later spent a year abroad at Lund University in Sweden, where I was trained in experimental and computational methods. This deepened my understanding in how language is processed in the brain and enhanced my expertise in theoretical and practical neurolinguistics. With this knowledge, I conducted event-related potential experiments in the Computational Neuroscience Lab at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and worked with eye tracking meta-datasets for children's language development at Stanford University.
Alongside my academic work, I explored the use of cognitive linguistics frameworks to analyse spoken interaction between humans and machines in intercultural contexts. This led me not only to collaborate with companies across the technology and education sectors and with academic projects in research institutions in the US and Europe, but also to find my passion for speech technology in society and in the underrepresented variations of widely spread languages. My experience working in the intersection of tech and the humanities has convinced me of the urgent need for human-centred approaches to technology; especially when considering the diversity of spoken languages. With so many languages in the world and so many people eager to connect, it is crucial that the humanities contribute to ensuring representation for all speakers, regardless of how they sound or where they come from.
Through the MPhil in Linguistics, Phonetics, and Philology, I aim to dedicate my career to research how sociolinguistic and phonetic insights can inform speech technology to serve multilingual communities worldwide, with a focus in the many variations of Peruvian Spanish that arose in contact with indigenous languages. My research project looks forward to studying speech in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish; particularly, the systematic borrowing of intonational patterns that are found in the indigenous languages spoken in the Amazon and that are in contact with Spanish. During my degree, I would also like to explore how evidential systems in languages engage with intonational patterns because of phonological borrowing, and to deep dive into topics regarding the prescriptive bias around accented speech in underrepresented linguistics that induce downstream harm to its speakers and their ethnical background.
I am profoundly grateful to the Ertegun Scholarship Programme for granting me the opportunity to come to the University of Oxford, and for giving me the chance to put the Latin American and Peruvian Humanities in the spotlight at the Ertegun House.
Whilst a linguist, I am also an avid runner and a former debater. I love fashion, psychological thrillers, musical theatre and, of course, Peruvian food.
