El diptongo/hiato como rasgo contrastivo: un estudio perceptual con hablantes de herencia de español

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 ley / 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.

Acceptability of Different Psychological Verbal Constructions by Heritage Spanish Speakers from California

This study set out to investigate whether US Heritage Spanish features a more streamlined verbal paradigm in psych verb constructions compared to standard varieties of Spanish, where HS speakers find an invariable third-person singular form acceptable with both singular and plural grammatical subjects. In standard Spanish, the semantic subjects of psych verbs are typically pre-verbal experiencers cast as oblique arguments in inverse predicates such as in me encantan los buhos ‘I love owls’. The translation of this sentence shows that equivalent English predicates are typically direct constructions. The data were gathered using an acceptability judgement questionnaire that was distributed to participants that fit into one of three groups: early bilingual heritage speakers of Spanish from California, advanced Spanish as L2 speakers, and non-bilingual native speakers of Spanish who had learnt English as an L2 as adults. The Heritage Spanish speakers in this group often patterned differently from both other groups, who surprisingly patterned together. We argue that this is due to L2 speakers’ mode of acquisition (formal and subject to prescriptive grammar), in comparison with Heritage Spanish speakers’ naturalistic acquisition. Specifically, we find evidence for a streamlining of the Spanish verbal paradigm not immediately attributed to English interference, and that in psych verb constructions, Heritage Spanish speakers more readily accept a third-person singular invariable verbal form. This differentiation of the verbal paradigm from standard Spanish use should be considered a bona fide linguistic change, but not proof of either incomplete acquisition or language attrition. Since Heritage Spanish speakers are, after all, native speakers of Spanish, this study shows that Heritage Spanish should be considered and studied as any other dialect of Spanish, with its distinctive grammatical features, and subject to variability and change.

Heritage Spanish Speakers’ Syllabification of -ear and -iar Verbs

Previous studies demonstrate that some aspects of the phonological grammar of heritage Spanish speakers in the United States are monolingual-like while other aspects show influence from English (Ronquest & Rao, 2018). The syllabification of vowel sequences is an interesting trait to study in the Spanish of U.S. heritage speakers due to the tendency in English phonology to separate vowels into separate syllables and the contrasting preference for diphthongs in Spanish. Studies across several language pairs have shown that second-language learners use the syllable structure of their first language in their second language, creating non-native-like patterns. We have little understanding, however, about whether heritage speakers syllabify like monolingual Spanish speakers or if they rely on the structure of the dominant language in their environment. The present study compares the syllabification judgments of 54 heritage speakers to those of 40 monolingual speakers. The results show that heritage speakers have monolingual-like syllabification intuitions for verbs ending in -ear and -iar overall, but heritage speakers who have spent less than two years in their parents’ home country syllabify differently in reading versus listening tasks. Lexical frequency did not affect the results, indicating that syllabification intuitions are robust even in unfamiliar words.

Initial phonological transfer in L3 Brazilian Portuguese and Italian

This study examines five variables posited to drive(s) initial phonological transfer of (part of) one system over another in an L3: language status (L1/L2), facilitation, global structural similarity, dominance, and bilingual experience. Specifically, we investigate production of intervocalic voiced stops by English/Spanish bilinguals at the initial stages of L3 Brazilian Portuguese (BP) or Italian. These segments surface as [−continuant] in BP, Italian, and English but are realized as [+continuant] in Spanish; English transfer is therefore facilitative while Spanish is non-facilitative. Three groups (English-dominant heritage Spanish speakers, L1 English/L2 Spanish, L1 Spanish/L2 English) enrolled in first semester BP or Italian completed delayed repetition tasks in all three languages. The majority of participants across groups produce Spanish-like [+continuant] segments, suggestive of a primary role for global structural similarity. For the subset of participants across groups that produces English-like/L3-like [−continuant] segments, debrief data indicate a potential relationship between metalinguistic knowledge and [−continuant] production.

“Saber español sí sirve” Academic Validation of Spanish as a Heritage Language

The article offers an account of the challenges and successes encountered in the process of opening a new Professional Spanish Minor, targeted mainly to Heritage Spanish speakers in a small traditional liberal arts college in the Midwest region of the USA. The article introduces the concept “bi-directional scaffolding”, and some of the topics discussed are the motivation for establishing the new program, the choice of curriculum, and the process used to involve diverse Faculty. Additionally, the results of an opinion survey distributed among Heritage Spanish speakers are presented, in which their career expectations and current perceptions of their life at this college have provided a much more accurate framework to design the new minor. Conclusions include a reflection on programmatic solutions for the needs of Hispanic students in our institution. The article proposes an inter-institutional dialogue regarding program standards and curricular schemes for Heritage Spanish students nationwide.

The processing of input with differential object marking by heritage Spanish speakers

Heritage Spanish speakers and adult immigrant bilinguals listened to wh-questions with the differential object marker a (quién/a quién ‘who/whoACC’) while their eye movements across four referent pictures were tracked. The heritage speakers were less accurate than the adult immigrants in their verbal responses to the questions, leaving objects unmarked for case at a rate of 18%, but eye movement data suggested that the two groups were similar in their comprehension, with both starting to look at the target picture at the same point in the question and identifying the target sooner with a quién ‘whoACC’ than with quién ‘who’ questions.

The processing of the object marker a by heritage Spanish speakers

Objectives: Previous research has found that object marking with the Spanish particle a is variable among heritage Spanish speakers, based on data from offline experimental measures. The online self-paced reading method used for the present study has the advantage of being less metalinguistic, which may be important with heritage speakers. This incremental measure of sentence processing can also examine whether the single letter form a is simply skipped over during reading. Methodology: Thirty-two heritage Spanish speakers and 16 later Spanish-English bilinguals participated. Critical stimuli were 20 items testing a marking with direct objects and 20 items testing a marking of indirect objects in ditransitive constructions. Data and analysis: The data set included reading times from self-paced reading, accuracy for post-stimulus comprehension questions, and secondary data from an offline acceptability judgment, all of which were analyzed via ANOVAs by subject and by item. Findings: Both groups exhibited robust sensitivity to a marking of indirect objects, sensitivity to a marking with inanimate direct objects, and no sensitivity to a marking with animate direct objects. Originality: This is the first study to examine the real-time processing of object marking among heritage Spanish speakers. It is the second study to include a comparison group of late Spanish-English bilinguals in the US, as opposed to monolinguals residing abroad. Significance: Incremental data from online processing indicate that the visual nonsalience of the marker a is not the sole or primary cause of variability in the marking of animate direct objects, because it was noticed in other written sentential contexts. In addition, the similarity between the two participant groups shows that variability with differential object marking is not limited to heritage speakers, but can also occur among US Spanish users educated abroad, where incomplete acquisition is not a question.

Code-switching at the auxiliary-VP boundary

While early code-switching research (i.e., Poplack, 1980) focused on the possibility of universal constraints on switching, MacSwan’s (2010, 2014) “Constraint-Free” research program centers on the notion that code-switching is only constrained by the interaction of a bilingual’s two grammars. In following with this proposal, the current study examines whether two types of Spanish-English bilinguals are equally sensitive to the (un)grammaticality of Spanish-English code-switching at the subject-predicate and auxiliary-verb phrase boundaries. Twenty-five heritage Spanish speakers and forty-four L2 Spanish learners completed an Audio Naturalness Judgment Task in which they judged grammatical and ungrammatical Spanish-English code-switching at these two syntactic junctions. Results indicate that the L2 Spanish speakers and the heritage bilinguals, regardless of their self-reported exposure to code-switching, correctly differentiated between grammatical and ungrammatical switches, suggesting that they have implicit knowledge of code-switching grammaticality which falls out from syntactic knowledge of the two languages.