Abstract
Motivated by existing research gaps exploring heritage Spanish, the current study analyzes the prosodic manifestation of sarcasm versus sincerity in 19 English-dominant, English-Spanish bilinguals residing in the Midwest region of the USA. In order to explore cross-generational effects and source input varieties, a subset of participants from within the same family was analyzed, including their Spanish-dominant, adult immigrant parents, but only for Spanish. Participants produced sarcastic and sincere utterances in response to contextualized stimuli in both English and Spanish. Data were analyzed for f0 mean, f0 range, and speech rate using Praat. A linear mixed-effects analysis examined the main and interactive effects of language, language dominance, gender, bilingual type, place of birth, and age on sarcasm and sincerity. Results show that sincere speech is faster than sarcastic speech and that speakers have a higher speech rate when speaking English as compared to Spanish. Results show that sincere speech is faster than sarcastic speech and that speakers have a higher speech rate when speaking English compared to Spanish. Results also indicate that the effect of attitude on speech rate can be modified by age, and that the effect of language on speech rate can be modified by age, gender, and dominance, as well as a two-way interactive effect of attitude and language on speech rate. Speaking in Spanish yields a higher f0 mean and range. Results also indicate two-way interactive effects of attitude and bilingual type, and language and dominance on f0 mean and range, as well as a three-way interactive effect of attitude, language, and age on f0 mean. In terms of intrafamilial findings, parents and their adult children pattern the same way in Spanish with respect to speech rate and f0, highlighting the role of source input variety. These results expand our knowledge of how different language experiences and sociolinguistic variables influence prosodic outcomes in heritage speakers of Spanish in the USA.
Highlights
Upon returning to the notion of English communication of sarcasm vs. sincerity as a baseline in our participants and adding the comments on sound system hybridity in heritage speakers by authors such as Kim (2019) and Kim and Repiso-Puigdelliura (2021), we suggest that our HSS start with a wider range in English than what we would expect in the Spanish of a Spanishdominant speaker, and filter their Spanish productions through the English strategies, which cause them to draw upon the English feature of an increased f0 range, rather than suppressing it toward what we would expect in Spanish
This study aimed to identify how the attitudes of sarcasm and sincerity are expressed in both Spanish and English by HSS, based on interactions among the sociolinguistic variables of gender, bilingual type, place of birth, language dominance, and age and the suprasegmental variables of f0 mean, f0 range, and speech rate, and how this attitudinal contrast is expressed by members within the same family
Important takeaways show that patterns of prosodic manifestations of attitude for HSS are overall similar in both English and Spanish, despite differing values for speech rate, f0 mean, and f0 range, and that, as a whole, HSS data in this study are distinct from what we might expect from monolingual or Spanish-dominant bilinguals, presenting a unique avenue for future research with respect to the perceptions of attitude by monolingual/Spanish-dominant bilinguals, as produced by HSS
Summary
1. Introduction with regard to jurisdictional claims in Previous research on heritage speakers of Spanish (HSS), most of which has been carried out with English-Spanish bilinguals in the United States, has produced fruitful results in the areas of prosody, including intonation, rhythm, and stress The interface between prosody and pragmatics in HSS is a relatively recent area of study that has and will continue to fill current research gaps in the area of heritage language (HL) research. One of these new areas of exploration that highlights the prosody–pragmatics interface is how attitudinal factors, such as the communication of sincerity and sarcasm, are manifested in the speech signal of HSS when producing their two languages.
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