Volume 18, Issue 2

Variationist research typically focuses on monolingual speakers of majority languages, leaving change in minority languages understudied, especially in diasporic communities. Addressing this gap, we analyze interview data from 16 Puerto Ricans in Lorain, Ohio, to examine social and linguistic constraints on the manner of articulation of coda /r/ ( N  = 2,363) across three sociolinguistic generations (G1, G1.5, G2). We find that the conditioning of /r/ in the first generation is attenuated by G2. Specifically, the pattern in G1 whereby women produce significantly more prescriptively normative taps and fricatives than men is absent in G2 women, who produce lenited variants (approximants and deletions) at the same rate as men. The conditioning of /r/ by the manner of articulation of the following sound is similarly absent in the second generation. However, the influence of preceding vowel height and speaker origin remains consistent across generations. We posit that the shifts in coda /r/ conditioning result from a combination of language-internal and language-external factors whereby the tendency in Caribbean varieties of Spanish to weaken coda consonants is promoted by forces in the contact environment.

The present study comprises the first approximation of the indexical field of Chilean Spanish creaky voice, a type of prosodic variation that is highly understudied in Spanish. This study asks what creaky voice means to listeners and what (social) identities they attribute to its users. Results of a survey collecting both quantitative and open-ended qualitative data from 148 Chilean Spanish listeners point to creaky voice being associated with lower status, familiar relationships, informal and relaxed style, perceived older age (for women talkers) and tall stature (for men talkers). I show that these results mirror embodied and ideological distinctions for creaky voice within this dialect, rather than actual production patterns. This study lays the groundwork for further examinations of the meaning of creaky voice in additional cross-linguistic and cross-cultural settings.

Previous work on the second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish voiced stop weakening by first language (L1) speakers of English has followed either a categorical or a continuous approach to allophonic production. This study combines both types of analyses to explore the phonetic development of intervocalic voiced stops. In addition, utterance initial voiced stops are examined to compare the development of different allophones, more precisely, approximants, voiced stops, and voiceless stops. Twenty-seven participants were recorded performing a reading task at the beginning and at the end of a semester during which they took a college-level Spanish phonetics course. Voiced stops in intervocalic and utterance initial position were analyzed for type of allophone production, and the consonant-vowel intensity ratio was used as a continuous measure of consonant weakening. Results show that learners develop their production of voiced stop weakening both at the segmental level, with an increase in approximants, and at the subsegmental level, with approximants being produced with increasingly less constriction. Moreover, an asymmetry between the development of intervocalic approximants and utterance initial voiced stops is observed, with the latter displaying a slower pace of acquisition. This finding is discussed within theories of L2 phonology that model the role of similarity in the acquisition process.

The testing of competing accounts of adjective-noun code-switching involving language pairs with different rules for adjective placement has produced inconclusive results. Some studies have found that word order is determined by the language of the verb, as predicted by the Matrix Language Framework, others point to the language of the adjective, as predicted by the Minimalist Program, and some have found an additive effect in which both the language of the verb and the language of the adjective determine word order. These results are based on the analysis of naturalistic oral data or controlled, experimental data. This paper provides new insights by analyzing a corpus of written Spanish-English code-switching. Results show that the pre-nominal position is preferred for both English and Spanish adjectives regardless of the language of the verb or the language of the adjective.

In Spanish, the -e suffix as a gender-inclusive morpheme (e.g., elles son bonites ) has been proposed as an alternative to traditional - o to refer to mixed-gender groups. Limited studies on this innovation suggest that the computation of inclusive morphology might not incur high processing costs. However, it is unclear whether native speakers who have acquired the Spanish binary grammatical system before puberty effectively process noun-adjective gender agreement with said inclusive language morpheme. Thirty-seven native speakers of Spanish completed a self-paced reading task and a sociolinguistic questionnaire. The former task contained sentences with (1) a subject comprised of two stereotypically masculine names (e.g., Pedro) and two stereotypically feminine names (e.g., María), (2) the verb están , and (3) an adjective with the traditional -o suffix or the inclusive -e suffix, and the latter included questions about language use and beliefs. Results show that while -e was associated with longer processing time overall, participants who reported using inclusive language most frequently showed no difference in processing -o and -e. Additionally, questionnaire data show that participant beliefs about learnability and usability of inclusive language mirror experimental findings. These results suggest that it is possible to acquire the - e morpheme in the L1 after puberty, with beliefs influencing the processing of these forms. Furthermore, the results highlight the roles of use of and exposure to inclusive gender in the language in order for speakers to acquire and process it.

Despite a significant body of research on the acquisition of Spanish psych verbs in adult bilingual populations, little attention has been given to the accusative/dative experiencer alternation that occurs in a subset of object experiencer psych verbs; namely, Class II verbs (e.g., sorprender ‘to surprise’). This syntactic alternation, which is relatively unique cross-linguistically, provides an opportunity to examine the factors at play when bilinguals are faced with optionality in argument structure. The present study explores experiencer preferences (accusative vs. dative) in three groups of bilingual Spanish-English speakers – L2 Spanish (L1 English late acquirers of L2 Spanish), heritage Spanish (early childhood acquirers of English), and L1 Spanish (late acquirers of L2 English). Participants completed an acceptability judgment task and a preference task, both designed to examine the role of context (eventive vs. stative) in experiencer choice. The results can be characterized as follows: L2 Spanish participants display a preference for dative experiencers, while L1 and heritage Spanish participants prefer accusative experiencers, regardless of context. Overall, the data patterns observed through both inter- and intra-group analyses are best explained in terms of overall language experience, including participants’ lifetime exposure to naturalistic input as well as language activation and use.

The current study investigates how native English phonetic categories affect the perception of Spanish diphthong /ei/ for second language (L2) learners and heritage speakers (HS) of Spanish. Based in L2 speech models (PAM-L2 and SLM-r), it was hypothesized that late L2 learners, especially beginners, would struggle in the categorization and discrimination of Spanish diphthong /ei/ and monophthong /e/ due to their predicted assimilation to the same first language (L1) English category. In contrast, heritage speakers (HS), exposed to these sounds from an early age, may have advantages over the L2 learners in the perception of Spanish /ei/. To test this, an identification task and an ABX discrimination task were administered to beginning-L2 learners, HS, and non-heritage native speakers (NHNS) of Spanish. Results showed that L2 learners were less accurate in identifying and discriminating Spanish /ei/, particularly in word-final position, where more L2 vowel lengthening has been found to occur Nibert (2012. Factors affecting the off-gliding of mid vowels by intermediate-level adult learners of Spanish with L1 English . Poster presented at the Current Approaches to Spanish and Portuguese Second Language Phonology Conference, University of South Carolina, 16–19 February), while HS performed similarly to NHNS in perception of Spanish /ei/. Some differences in vowel identification mappings were noted between HS and NHNS, however, possibly due to HS knowledge of English orthography. Overall, findings support the predictions made under the PAM-L2 and SLM-r and highlight the effects of early language exposure and cross-linguistic influence on L2 and HS speech perception.