Bidirectional prosodic effects of code-switching in Spanish-Basque bilinguals

Abstract

This study investigates the prosody of code-switching in Spanish-Basque bilinguals, which has not been previously documented. Peninsular Spanish and Basque have several prosodic differences, including peak alignment in pitch accents. Spanish has delayed peaks (Estebas Plana & Prieto (2008)), while Basque has early peaks (Elordieta & Hualde (2015)). The current study investigates whether code-switched words are conditioned by prosodic position and whether the peak alignment and f0 maximum of a pitch accent differ between monolingual context (Spanish only) and code-switched contexts. Bilinguals (aged 21-31) from a Basque-dominant region (Lekeitio, n = 3) and a Spanish-dominant region (Bilbao, n = 4) participated in the present study. The data was coded for the following predictor variables: prosodic position, peak alignment, and f0 maximum in pitch accents. Results reveal that code-switches occur almost equally in phrase-medial and final positions. For peak alignment, Lekeitio speakers produced early peaks in both code-switching contexts (Spanish-Basque, Basque-Spanish), which matches monolingual norms for Lekeitio varieties of Spanish and Basque. However, Spanish-dominant speakers also produced early peaks in both code-switching contexts, despite delayed peak norms for Peninsular Spanish. Finally, preliminary results reveal greater f0 during code-switching contexts for Lekeitio speakers only. Further results and implications will be discussed.