A Phonetic Account of Spanish-English Bilinguals’ Divergence with Agreement

Laura Colantoni,Ana T Pérez-Leroux,Ruth Martínez,Natalia Rinaldi,Natalia Mazzaro

doi:10.3390/languages5040058

Laura Colantoni, Ana T Pérez-Leroux + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5040058

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Abstract

Does bilingual language influence in the domain of phonetics impact the morphosyntactic domain? Spanish gender is encoded by word-final, unstressed vowels (/a e o/), which may diphthongize in word-boundary vowel sequences. English neutralizes unstressed final vowels and separates across-word vocalic sequences. The realization of gender vowels as schwa, due to cross-linguistic influence, may remain undetected if not directly analyzed. To explore the potential over-reporting of gender accuracy, we conducted parallel phonetic and morphosyntactic analyses of read and semi-spontaneous speech produced by 11 Monolingual speakers and 13 Early and 13 Late Spanish-English bilinguals. F1 and F2 values were extracted at five points for all word-final unstressed vowels and vowel sequences. All determiner phrases (DPs) from narratives were coded for morphological and contextual parameters. Early bilinguals exhibited clear patterns of vowel centralization and higher rates of hiatuses than the other groups. However, the morphological analysis yielded very few errors. A follow-up integrated analysis revealed that /a and o/ were realized as centralized vowels, particularly with [+Animate] nouns. We propose that bilinguals’ schwa-like realizations can be over-interpreted as target Spanish vowels. Such variable vowel realization may be a factor in the vulnerability to attrition in gender marking in Spanish as a heritage language.

Highlights

Heritage speakers, i.e., bilinguals who were raised with a home language different from the dominant language of their communities, exhibit various patterns of divergence and cross-linguistic influence
We begin this section by summarizing results of the phonetic analysis, the which includes the characterization of single vowels and vowelthe sequences
3.2 presents the morphosyntactic analysis and the final section combines the phonetic results obtained for single vowels with analysis and predictability the final section combineswhether the phonetic obtained singlecentralization vowels with is morphological to explore it mayresults be possible thatforvowel morphological to explore whether it may be possible that vowel centralization is being being undetectedpredictability when we report accuracy in gender agreement

Summary

Introduction

I.e., bilinguals who were raised with a home language different from the dominant language of their communities, exhibit various patterns of divergence and cross-linguistic influence. Studies of heritage speakers of Spanish document difficulties with gender agreement and concord for both adults (e.g., Montrul et al 2008) and children Cuza and Pérez-Tattam (2016). Attrition of the gender system increases across bilingual generations (Martínez-Gibson 2011) and during school years (Cuza and Pérez-Tattam 2016). Given the frequency of the configuration under consideration (a determiner followed by a noun), and the morphological transparency and robustness of the Spanish agreement system, one might speculate that input factors cannot fully account for the vulnerability of this domain beyond lexical errors with low-frequency, gender-opaque nouns. We turn to the perception-production interface to explore an alternative explanatory source to current accounts of bilingual vulnerability of Spanish gender

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