How to Start a Request? A Contrastive Study of Alerters in Spanish by Speakers of L1 Spanish and L1 French

Cultural Competency in Voice Evaluation: Considerations of Normative Standards for Sociolinguistically Diverse Voices

This paper compares heritage speakers and second language (L2) speakers of Spanish with Dutch as their dominant language, in order to explore the role of age of onset and manner of acquisition in the nature of the knowledge (implicit vs. explicit) of the subjunctive. Differently from previous studies, all items were presented orally and in written form, so that language mode of presentation could be excluded as a confounding factor. Moreover, the groups were matched on their general proficiency in Spanish using both an explicit and an implicit proficiency task. The results showed that the L2 speakers outperformed the heritage speakers in the explicit knowledge task and vice versa in the implicit knowledge task, suggesting that differential task effects, which thus far have only been attested for morpho-syntactic phenomena, can be extended to interface phenomena as well. These findings imply that age of onset and manner of acquisition have an influence in the way knowledge is represented in these two populations, and moreover emphasize the importance of using different task types in bilingual research.

Factors modulating cross-linguistic co-activation in bilinguals

Gender and gender agreement in bilingual native and non-native grammars: A view from child and adult functional–lexical mixings

This study investigates whether advanced L2 speakers exhibit comparable sensitivity to island constraints and the that-trace effect as L1 speakers during real-time processing of long distance grammatical and ungrammatical wh-extractions in English. L1 Spanish, Turkish, and English speakers participated in an online grammaticality judgment task (GJT) featuring five types of wh-extractions with island and that-trace violations, presented in full-sentence and self-paced reading conditions. Findings reveal distinctions between L2 learners and native speakers in accuracy and response times, particularly in subject extractions from non-finite clauses and that-trace violations. However, subject-object asymmetry was consistent across groups, suggesting shared processing patterns. L2 learners showed sensitivity to island constraints, paralleling native speakers. L1 influence varied, with no significant discrepancy between Spanish and Turkish groups. Turkish learners' success in grammatical wh-extractions may stem from overt movement via scrambling and universal grammar availability, whereas Spanish participants displayed nuanced L1 influence on ungrammatical wh-extractions with that-trace violations.

High-proficient Swedish users of L2 French and Spanish were compared with native speakers of French, Spanish and Swedish with regard to how the syntactic peripheries in natural colloquial speech are structured. Two different though interrelated aspects were included: thus a cross-linguistic analysis comparing the three native speaker groups is combined with an analysis addressing the question of the upper limits of L2 acquisition. All left peripheral (LP) and right peripheral (RP) constituents of a corpus of 110,759 words were classified in a taxonomy relying both on syntactic and functional-pragmatic criteria. The cross-linguistic analysis showed that French and Spanish L1 speakers produced significantly longer LP sequences than the Swedish L1 speakers, who, in turn, put conspicuously more weight on the RP. Significant differences between the three languages were also found with regard to several LP and RP constituent categories. The L2 acquisition-oriented analysis showed that with few exceptions the high-proficient L2 users behaved like L1 users. Although a few interlanguage-related phenomena could be observed, no instances of any clear transfer from the speaker’s L1 appeared in either L2 speaker group.

The main purpose of the present study is to analyze certain cross-cultural aspects of the refusal speech act in native speakers of Peninsular Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, as well as the interlanguage pragmatics of Chinese learners of Spanish as a foreign language. Due to linguistic and cultural differences, Chinese and Spanish speakers show both diversities and similarities in refusal strategies, even in the same situation. If these discrepancies are not considered, the recipient of the refusal may feel lost or even enraged, which can lead to misunderstandings and negatively affect the relationship between the interlocutors. Previous scholars have conducted a limited amount of research on the speech act of refusal. Even fewer studies on refusal strategies have been conducted from a contrastive point of view between Chinese and Spanish speakers. 
\nThe paper aims to investigate how the three groups of informants perform the speech act of refusal by examining the semantic formulas used with respect to their frequency and order of use. On the other hand, it also aims to investigate the influence of contextual factors, namely relative power, social distance and type of initiated acts, on the elaboration of refusal in order to explain the cultural variation exhibited by Chinese and Spanish culture. In addition, the study proposes to find evidence of negative pragmatic transfer that may exist in the data of Chinese learners of Spanish. 
\nFor this study, data were collected through an open-ended discourse completion test accomplished by 150 informants divided into three homogeneous groups. The questionnaire consisted of 16 different situations in which different degrees of relative power or social distance between speaker and listener can be identified. The data obtained were analyzed in terms of semantic formulas and categorized according to the refusal taxonomy proposed by Beebe et al. (1990). 
\nFrom the data obtained, it can be observed that Spanish native speakers use direct strategies more frequently than the two groups of Chinese speakers. In contrast, Chinese native speakers prefer to employ more strategies to alleviate the illocutionary force of rejection. As for the influence of contextual variables, it has been noted that both Chinese native speakers and Chinese learners of Spanish show some sensitivity toward the initiated act of request, while Spanish native speakers are more concerned with the offer. Second, social status has been found to have a greater impact on the use of refusal strategies for Chinese speakers compared to Spanish speakers. In other words, the higher the social status of the Chinese speaker. On the other hand, in both cultures, when the social distance between interlocutors is medium, more strategies tend to be used. Finally, it has been noted that the use of strategies by Chinese learners of Spanish is largely influenced by their native language. For example, a greater tendency toward long negotiation in communication has been noted, as well as a greater sensitivity toward the initiated act of requesting. Also, some learners have been found to use strategies specific, such as "nominal forms of address ".

The present article aims at investigating the pro-drop phenomenon in L2 Spanish. The phenomenon of pro-drop or null subject is a typological feature of some languages, which are characterized by an implicit subject in cases of topic continuity. More specifically, behaviour regarding subject (dis)continuity in Spanish differs from French. This paper will offer a contrastive analysis on subject realisation by French learners of L2 Spanish compared to L1 Spanish speakers. So, the goal of this pilot study is to see if a different functioning in pro-drop in the mother tongue also influences the L2. The study is based upon a written description task presented to the two groups of participants: the experimental group of French mother tongue L2 Spanish language learners and the control group of Spanish native speakers.

The aim of the present study is to examine and describe Swedish upper secondary students’ use of their background languages while translating a text from Italian, a language unknown to them, into either their L2 English or their L3 French or Spanish. The assumption here is that searching for similarities between these languages is a natural feature of language learning and that intercomprehension can lead to at least limited understanding of an unknown language. The written translations were analysed quantitatively by calculating translation accuracy in the different languages and qualitatively by means of a retrospective questionnaire on the translation process. A psychotypology questionnaire was also included to examine the participants’ perceptions of the similarities between the languages involved. The majority of the participants stated that they perceived Spanish to be more similar to Italian than any of the other languages involved in the study. Moreover, the results show that the students in the group that translated into Spanish translated the text more accurately than those who translated into French and English. The comments in the retrospective questionnaire show that the students reflected on similarities between the languages on a lexical level, but also on structural and phonological similarities. Contextual cues were also important for the participants’ inferences and translations.

This article reports the results of two experiments investigating the combined role of vowel length and length of fricative voicing in the identification, by Brazilians, of minimal pairs such as casa /z/ – caca /s/ produced by speakers of Spanish (L1). In Experiment 1, stimuli were manipulated so that length of voicing in the fricative was tested in two levels (100% or 0% of voicing) and vowel length was tested in four levels (25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the length of the total vowel). In Experiment 2, voicing length was tested in three levels (25%, 50% and 75% of voicing), combined with the four levels of vowel length (25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of the length of the total vowel). Both experiments were run on TP Software (Rauber et al. 2012), and forty Brazilian listeners with no experience with Spanish took part in both tasks. The results show an interaction between the two cues, especially in the stimuli with no full voicing in the fricative. These findings provide additional evidence to the gradient status of speech in production and perceptual phenomena (Albano 2001; Albano 2012; Perozzo 2017), besides shedding light on the teaching of Brazilian Portuguese as an Additional Language.

Understanding how ser and estar contrast is one of the greatest challenges in the grammar of L2 Spanish, but not all the uses of these verbs are equally complex to learn. This study explores two kinds of uses: (a) the alternation between ser and estar with participles; and (b), the combination of estar with unbounded adjectives. Thus, we analyse two types of L2 learning challenges: the combination of these copulas with participles involves the syntax-semantics interface, whereas interpreting estar uses with unbounded adjectives requires processing at the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface. As an exploration into the challenges of acquiring these different interface phenomena, we present a study comparing the copula choices, interpretations and acceptability judgements of three groups of Spanish speakers: native speakers of European Spanish (N=48), upper intermediate and advanced L2 Spanish learners with two different L1s: L1 French (N=46) and Portuguese (N=30). Results show clear effects of crosslinguistic influence on the acquisition process. All of the participant groups showed greater variability in the tasks probing the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface as compared to those involving syntax/semantics interface phenomena. However, the learner groups, especially the L1 French group, were prone to greater variability than the L1 Spanish speakers.

ABSTRACTConsidering the acquisition of past tense uses by L2 Spanish advanced learners with closely related L1s (French, Portuguese), this study attempts to identify factors associated with variability, such as negative transfer or interface integration. We report data on the acquisition, by adult L1 French and Portuguese learners at B2 and C1 CEFR levels, of Spanish tense-aspect morphology: simple and compound past (SP, CP), imperfect (IMP), progressive (PROG), and pluperfect (PLP) forms, and from a control group of European Spanish speakers’ use and interpretation of these tenses. Data were collected through a film oral retell and two written interpretation tasks; the second written task (a follow-up task), was performed only by L1 French speakers. In the oral task, comparing both L1 backgrounds, negative transfer is more pervasive for the Portuguese groups. However, in the interpretation tasks, the French speakers showed greater difficulties, linked not only to L1 transfer but also to nonprototypical tense/aspect associations and pragmatically based temporal reference. The data suggest, in relation to Lardiere’s (2008, 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, that both feature reassembly and interface integration are sources of variability in the acquisition of L2 interpretable features that are also present in the L1.

This study investigates vocalic creak in connection to the demarcation of prosodic boundaries in Spanish. Data from a picture task from 10 native Spanish speakers from diverse dialects was examined word-medially and word-finally. A total of 800 vowels were analyzed acoustically to determine if they involved creak; duration of creak relative to vowel duration was also recorded. The role of prosodic context, vowel quality and gender were examined. Our results show that creak is one of the cues that signals the end of prosodic constituents, particularly at higher prosodic levels: it averages 64% of realizations word-finally, but only 4% medially; and it is more pervasive in higher prosodic domains. Creak is more likely in males than females (80 vs. 53%), and vowel quality has no effect on creak word-finally, although word-medially /a/ is more frequently creaked than other vowels. We discuss the implications of our results in comparison with previous studies on creaky voice in Spanish and English, in particular Garellek, Marc & Patricia Keating. 2015. Phrase-final creak: Articulation, acoustics, and distribution. In Paper presented at the 89th meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Portland, Oregon, 8–11 January, which report a higher rate of creak for Mexican Spanish females compared to males utterance-finally, and Kim, Ji Young. 2017. Voice quality transfer in the production of Spanish heritage speakers and English L2 learners of Spanish. Silvia Perpiñán. In David Heap, Itziri Moreno-Villamar & Adriana Soto-Corominas (eds.), Selected papers from the 44th linguistic symposium on romance languages (LSRL), 191–207. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, which found creaky voice utterance-finally in L2 Spanish and heritage Spanish speakers, but not in L1 Spanish participants.

Recent findings indicate that native speakers (L1) use grammatical gender marking on articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns (e.g., Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007; Dussias, Valdés Kroff, Guzzardo Tamargo, & Gerfen, 2013). Conversely, adult second language (L2) learners for whom grammatical gender is absent in their first language appear to need near-native proficiency to behave like native speakers (Dussias et al., 2013; Hopp, 2013). The question addressed here is whether sensitivity to grammatical gender in L2 learners of Spanish is modulated by the cognate status of nouns due to their heightened parallel orthographic, phonological, morpho-syntactic and semantic activation. Additionally, the role of transparent and non-transparent word-final gender marking cues was examined because past studies have shown that native speakers of Spanish are sensitive to differences in gender transparency (Caffarra, Janssen, & Barber, 2014). Participants were English learners of Spanish and Spanish monolingual speakers. Data were collected using the visual world paradigm. Participants saw 2-picture visual scenes in which objects either matched in gender (same-gender trials) or mismatched (different-gender trials). Targets were embedded in the preamble Encuentra el/la ___ ‘Find the ___’. The monolingual group displayed an anticipatory effect on different gender trials, replicating past studies that show that native speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in prenominal modifiers predictively. The learners were able to use gender information on the articles to facilitate processing, but only when the nouns had gender endings that were transparent. Cognate status did not confer an advantage during grammatical gender processing.

This study reflects on the meaning of the results of a self-paced grammaticality judgment task that tested island configurations (with gaps and resumptive pronouns) in L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish. Results indicated that resumptive pronouns do not rescue extractions from islands, as traditionally assumed in grammatical theory, and propose that islands are essentially an interpretative or processing matter, and not only a grammatical one, as in Kluender (1998). This study further challenges the L2 studies that proposed that L2 learners are fundamentally different from native speakers because they usually fail to reject island configurations, and shows that L2 learners are sensitive to the same processing and interpretative mechanisms that native speakers employ to parse island configurations. Generally speaking, this study proposes that apparent purely syntactic restrictions such as extractions from islands might not depend on their grammatical formation, but on other relevant factors such as plausibility, embedding, and processability, which together with grammatical well-formedness configure a more holistic and useful notion of linguistic acceptability.