Volume 14, Issue 2

We examined gender assignment patterns in the speech of Spanish/English bilingual children, paying particular attention to the influence of three gender assignment strategies (i.e., analogical gender, masculine default gender, phonological gender) that have been proposed to constrain the gender assignment process in Spanish/English bilingual speech. Our analysis was based on monolingual Spanish nominals ( n  = 1774), which served as a comparative baseline, and Spanish/English mixed nominal constructions ( n  = 220) extracted from oral narratives produced by 40 child bilinguals of different grade levels (second graders vs. fifth graders) and instructional programs (English immersion vs. two-way bilingual) from Miami Dade, Florida. The narratives, available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, Brian. 2000. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk , 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), were collected by Pearson, Barbara Z. 2002. Narrative competence among monolingual and bilingual school children in Miami. In D. Kimbrough Oller & Rebecca E. Eilers (eds.), Language and literacy in bilingual children , 135–174. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Results revealed that in Spanish nominal constructions, children across both instructional programs and grade levels evinced native-like acquisition of grammatical gender. In mixed nominals, children overwhelmingly assigned the masculine gender to English nouns. Notably, irrespective of schooling background, simultaneous Spanish/English bilingual children used the masculine default gender strategy when assigning gender to English nouns with feminine translation equivalents. This suggests that from age seven, simultaneous Spanish/English child bilingual acquisition of grammatical gender is characterized by a predisposition towards the employment of the masculine default gender strategy in bilingual speech.

In this paper, we propose the implementation of a full-fledged feature-based lexicalist syntactic theory as a way to represent the possible configurations of features in the learner’s interlanguage and formalize a theory of acquisition based in feature reassembly. We describe gender agreement pronominal coindexation in Spanish using Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) and use it to analyze the results of a self-paced reading test with L1 and L2 speakers. We find that the specification of the gender feature value at the syntactic level in epicene antecedents facilitates pronominal resolution in L1 Spanish speakers. Conversely, there is a cognitive cost when the gender feature is underspecified at the syntactic level in common gender antecedents; this cost is not found among L2 speakers. The detailed descriptions in terms of feature specification in the HPSG framework allow us to observe differences between the L1 and L2 grammars in fine-grained detail and represent optionality at the lexical level.

Costa Rica’s second-person singular (2PS) address system is known for both its changing nature and its incorporation of tuteo, ustedeo, and voseo forms. While the latter are generalized across communicative contexts, tuteo use has oscillated over time, being consistently associated with foreignness, effeminacy and homosexuality, with one study (Marín Esquivel, Rebeca. 2012. El pronombre ‘tú’ en los grupos homosexual y heterosexual heredianos. Revista Comunicación 21(2). 31–40) suggesting that homosexual men report using tuteo at levels significantly higher than heterosexuals. In this study, we revisit this finding using new data from a survey that elicited stated preferences for address forms and attitudes towards tuteo across different communicative contexts. Multinomial logistic regressions compared the address choices of homosexual men with those of heterosexual men and women, and attitudes were gauged by means of a thematic analysis. Results indicate that currently, with few exceptions, what best characterizes the distribution of address forms are similarities, regardless of sexuality or gender, with all participants reporting low rates of tuteo use across communicative settings. While these results suggest continued change in tuteo use, linguistic attitudes reveal a persistent perceived ideological connection between tuteo, foreignness, effeminacy and homosexuality.

The null direct object clitic is described as one of the distinctive morphosyntactic features of Basque Spanish (e.g., compré el libro i , pero se me ha olvidado traer ø i ). However, no study to date has explored the variable usage of this form in cross-generational terms. The present inquiry aims to fill this void by analyzing and contrasting the results of two studies by four generations of Spanish-Basque bilinguals with the following age ranges: 85–96 (Generation 1), 55–75 (Generation 2), 35–45 (Generation 3), 18–25 (Generation 4). The education level of the participants was also taken into consideration. The first study consisted of an acceptability judgment task, in which the participants rated the acceptability of sentences with a null direct object using a 5-point Likert scale. The independent linguistic variables in this study were the semantic features [+/-definiteness] and [+/-specificity]. The acceptance rate of null direct object clitics was significantly higher among Generation 1 and 2 speakers than among those of Generation 3 and 4, with no effect of definiteness or specificity. In the second study, based on an elicitation task, older speakers (Generation 1 and 2) produced significantly more null direct object clitics than their younger counterparts (Generation 3 and 4). By contrasting the differential behavior of the participants across and within the same generation, it is shown that the generational effects observed are mainly due to the participants’ different levels of formal education.

This study explores contact between Ladino-speaking Sephardim and Spanish-speaking Latinos in New York City and Los Angeles, home to two of the largest factions of each population in the United States. While the retention of postalveolar sibilants [ʒ, dʒ, ʃ] in Ladino, corresponding to velar [x] in Spanish, helps distinguish these varieties, research has demonstrated cases where Sephardim implement the latter phone in lieu of one of the former. That such contact-induced change is a result of interaction between Sephardim and Latinos is further examined in this research. Twenty-five speakers of Ladino participated in two oral-production tasks: within-group and between-group testing. In the former, informants were paired with another speaker of Ladino; in the latter, they were paired with a speaker of Spanish. Data reveal that informants replace postalveolar sibilants with velar [x] at a rate of 18.2% within group and 76.5% between group, when direct equivalencies exist. Statistical analysis demonstrates that production of velar [x], the dependent variable, is conditioned by several independent variables, both social (age, gender, city of residence, interlocutor) and linguistic (type of lexical correspondence and origin of lexicon). Subsequent discussion considers the role of accommodation in determining the ways in which speakers select and implement variation in their speech.

Variationist research on subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Spanish typically incorporates all grammatical persons/numbers into the same analysis, with important exceptions such as studies focusing exclusively on first-person singular (e.g., Travis, Catherine E. 2005. The yo-yo effect: Priming in subject expression in Colombian Spanish. In Randall Gess & Edward J Rubin (eds.), Selected papers from the 34th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) , 329–349. Amsterdam, Salt Lake City: Benjamins 2004; Travis, Catherine E. 2007. Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19. 101–135; Travis, Catherine E. & Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2012. What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics 23(4). 711–748), third-person singular (Shin, Naomi Lapidus. 2014. Grammatical complexification in Spanish in New York: 3sg pronoun expression and verbal ambiguity. Language Variation and Change 26. 303–330), and third-person plural subjects (Lapidus, Naomi & Ricardo Otheguy. 2005. Overt nonspecific ellos in Spanish in New York. Spanish in Context 2(2). 157–174). The current study is the first variationist analysis (to the best of my knowledge) to focus solely on first-person plural SPE. It is well-established that nosotros/nosotras exhibits one of the lowest rates of SPE relative to the other persons/numbers; however, factors conditioning its variation are less understood. Conversational corpus data from Mexican Spanish are employed to examine tokens of first-person plural SPE ( n =660) in terms of frequency and constraints, incorporating factors such as TMA, switch reference, and verb class in logistic regression analyses. Results suggest that nosotros , like other subjects, is strongly impacted by switch reference and tense-mood-aspect (TMA). However, the TMA effect is unique in that preterit aspect is shown to favor overt nosotros relative to other TMAs, diverging from previous studies. Furthermore, verb class — a factor found to be repeatedly significant in the literature — is inoperative for nosotros . These results suggest that nosotros does not respond to the same factors as other persons/numbers. Additionally, the findings lend support to researchers regarding the importance of studying individual persons/numbers in subject variation research.

The present study investigates the relationship between discourse integration skills and Spanish copula choice in monolingual Chilean Spanish-speaking children. Previous research has focused on determining the age at which children associate estar to a transitory property and ser to an inherent property (Holtheuer, Carolina. 2012. Spanish-speaking children do not always overuse estar. Revista Signos 45(78). 3–19, Holtheuer, Carolina & Johanna Rendle-Short. 2013. Ser and estar: Corrective input to children’s errors of the Spanish copula verbs. First Language 33(2). 155–167, Schmitt, Cristina & Karen Miller. 2007. Making discourse dependent decisions: The case of the copulas ser and estar in Spanish. Lingua 117(11). 1907–1929, Sera, Maria. 1992. To be or to be: Use and acquisition of the Spanish copulas. Journal of Memory and Language 31. 408–427, Requena, Pablo, Astrid Román-Hernández & Karen Miller. 2015. Children’s knowledge of the Spanish copulas ser and estar with novel adjectives. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics 22. 193–207), showing that by 2 years of age children know the categorial distribution of the two copulas, but that at 5 years of age only some children, but not all children, have knowledge of the transitory/inherent distinction that often arises when the same adjective occurs with one or the other copula. The present study seeks to extend the latter research by further investigating the factors that might influence why only some children associate estar to transitory properties at 5 years of age, a question that will not only shed light on when the subtle meaning differences of the copulas are acquired, but also how they are acquired. Maienborn, Claudia (2005. A discourse-based account of Spanish ser/estar. Linguistics 43(1). 155–180) notes that estar is discourse-linked, while ser is not. Specifically, the use of estar with an adjectival predicate to compare changes to a person across different stages of their life relies on one’s ability to integrate the larger discourse (i.e., these various stages) into their statement. In the present study, to determine whether Spanish-speaking children’s production of the copula estar with adjectival predicates was associated with their discourse integration abilities, children were presented with both a Copula Elicitation Task and a Discourse Production Task. Analyses revealed an association between children’s discourse integration skills and their use of estar with adjectives to express transitory properties, a finding that indicates that children’s acquisition of estar is mastered late – at least in part because of their late development of discourse integration skills more generally. Most studies on the acquisition of estar with adjectival complements have focused primarily on comprehension. Experimental studies on children’s production of estar are rare. As such, this experimental study is one of the few that examines children’s use of estar in production and the first, as far as we know, that provides empirical support for the link between discourse integration skills in children and their use of estar with adjectival predicates.

This study examines the perception of diphthongs and hiatuses in 11 heritage Spanish speakers and 6 Spanish-dominant bilingual speakers with an AXB discrimination task (Lukyanchenko, Anna & Kira Gor. 2011. Perceptual correlates of phonological representations in heritage speakers and L2 learners. In Nick Danis, Kate Mesh & Hyunsuk Sung (eds.), Proceedings of the 35th annual Boston University conference on language development , 414–426. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press). In Spanish, diphthongs and hiatuses represent distinct vocalic sequences (Schwegler, Armin, Juergen Kempff & Ana Ameal-Guerra. 2010. Fonética y fonología españolas , 4th edn. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley). However, there are words in which the pronunciation of the vocalic sequence as either a diphthong or hiatus serves as a contrastive feature, as in the example of l ey / leí (Face, Timothy L. & Scott M. Alvord. 2004. Lexical and acoustic factors in the perception of the Spanish diphthong vs. Hiatus contrast. Hispania 87(3). 553–564; Hualde, José I. & Mónica Prieto. 2002. On the diphthong/hiatus contrast in Spanish: Some experimental results. Linguistics 40(2). 217–234). Given that these features also exist in English, albeit in different forms, does L2 influence of English impact heritage Spanish listeners' perception of diphthongs and hiatuses in Spanish? Specifically, this study examines discrimination between the diphthong / hiatus as a contrasting feature with /a e o/ as the nucleic vowel in the diphthongs. Results indicate that there is not a significant difference in discrimination between heritage speakers and Spanish-dominant bilinguals. Additionally, the nucleic vowel in the diphthong tokens is a significant factor for the ability to discriminate diphthongs vs. hiatuses in heritage Spanish speakers. The findings of this study contribute to the corpus of phonetic studies focusing on heritage Spanish speakers and perception in their heritage language.