Spanish Dialects Research Articles

Cross-national Differences in Bullying Dynamics: Comparing Latinx Youths’ Experiences in Mexico and the USA

Although bullying is increasingly researched in the USA, there remains a limited study of bullying among Mexican youth. To address this gap, the present study compared bullying dynamics across the two countries, with a specific focus on Latinx youth in the US and Mexican youth. Data come from a large school-based survey of 3030 US self-identified as Latinx/Hispanic and 2211 Mexican adolescents. The survey utilized the US-derived term “bullying” for the definition-based questions with the definitions and behaviors translated into the local Mexican Spanish dialect. Logistic regression results indicated that the prevalence of youth who bully is similar; however, more Mexican youth reported being a victim while more US Latinx youth reported witnessing bullying. US Latinx youths’ responses to bullying reflect behaviors emphasized in bullying prevention programs whereas Mexican youth reported more retaliatory responses. This study informs our understanding of similarities and differences in bullying dynamics across contexts, which is critical to informing intervention development and adaptation to target locally relevant bullying behaviors.

The microvariation of the Spanish perfect in three varieties

This study investigates the variability in the use of the Preterit cante (‘I sang’) and the Present Perfect he cantado (‘I have sung’) across three Spanish dialects: Peninsular (PEN), Peruvian (PER) and Argentinian (AR). For this purpose, we analyze the effect of type of context and temporal adverbials on the selection of these two forms. The corpus has been obtained through online questionnaires, comprising a total of thirty-two exercises that evaluate the use of the two verb forms in the following contexts: continuative, relevance of present, life experience, prehodiernal context and without temporal adverbs. The results of this research seek to contribute to the description of dialectal differences with respect to the use of the Preterit and the Present Perfect from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective.

Language Vitality of Spanish in Equatorial Guinea: Language Use and Attitudes

This study investigates the use of and attitudes towards, Spanish in the multilingual Republic of Equatorial Guinea, the only African country with Spanish as an official language. The Spanish dialect of Equatorial Guinea is an understudied area, although descriptive research on the Spanish language spoken there began in the 1950s. Very few research studies have been carried out on the sociolinguistic dynamic of this multilingual country. Four scales of language vitality were utilized and it was demonstrated that Spanish in Equatorial Guinea is not endangered and continues to thrive. An online survey was also performed to assess Spanish language use and attitudes towards the Equatoguinean variety of Spanish. Respondents were highly educated, middle-class and spoke at least two languages. It was observed that Spanish was the functional language in almost all the sociocultural contexts or domains. Equatorial Guineans share that Spanish is important to their identity as the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa.

TP-internal focus and dialectal variation: the case of the Focalizing Ser

Abstract This study examines patterns of variation in the perception of the Focalizing Ser (FS) structure by speakers of Colombian Spanish. The FS occurs alongside the standard pseudo-cleft construction and it has been reported in only a few Spanish dialects. We discuss data collected from 371 participants living in five Colombian cities (Barranquilla, Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Cali, and Medellín). The results of two acceptability judgment tests (128 sentences tested in both audio and written formats) confirm that FS is an acceptable structure and indicate similar acceptability tendencies across the country: Prepositional Phrases, Complementizer/Inflectional Phrases, and Complex Verbal Phrases are the most accepted FS-focused sentence types, whereas Sentence-Final FS is the least accepted. A comparison of these results with those obtained from our previous study in the Dominican Republic [Méndez Vallejo, D. Catalina. 2015a. Changing the focus: An empirical study of “Focalizing ser” (‘to be’) in Dominican Spanish. Isogloss 1/1. 67–93.] show some analogous tendencies even across macro-varieties.

Cohesion and Particularity in the Spanish Dialect Continuum

Abstract This paper studies the degree of cohesion among varieties of Spanish, proposing an analysis of Spanish dialectal variation and the internal cohesion of varieties using the Varilex-R database (2016). A battery of complementary statistical tests (correlation analysis, cluster analysis, association analysis) has been applied to these data in order to establish the distances between the principal modalities of the Spanish language. It also introduces the calculation of indices of generality and particularity, which, by establishing associations between linguistic uses within different countries, illustrate the extent to which each country’s Spanish, by virtue of its linguistic uses, can be considered more general or more particular.

Strong Integration in bilingual grammar, formalized

Abstract We present elicited production data reflecting cross-linguistic interference effects in the English wh-questions of Spanish-English bilingual children to provide a proof-of-concept for a proposed new formal analysis of such effects across cross-linguistic influence phenomena. The observed interference effects are interpreted as evidence for the Strong Integration hypothesis of bilingual grammatical architecture, in the context of independently documented facilitation and interference effects in a range of bilingual acquisition contexts. Building on an existing Optimality-Theoretic (OT) model of monolingual acquisition and a specific account of the adult grammar of wh-structures across dialects of Spanish, we propose that the individual patterns documented, in particular the sensitivity in child English to distinctions made in Spanish dialects on the basis of an argument/adjunct contrast, find a straightforward explanation in the OT model of acquisition as adapted to bilingual situations. The generalizability of the model as well as effects of exposure and dominance are discussed.

Translating Characters: Eliza Doolittle “Rendered” into Spanish

Pygmalion, one of the best known of George Bernard Shaw’s plays in Spain, was translated and performed in 1919 and published in 1920. Up to 2016, it has been rendered into Spanish five times. The main character in Pygmalion is Eliza, a Cockney woman who feels the need to change her life to accede to the middle class. Shaw characterized Eliza in two ways, her clothes and her speech, as she speaks the dialect of her socio-geographical background, Cockney. Translators tend to fail to do justice to Eliza’s characterization for two reasons. The first is the lexical and grammatical choices, which do not always convey the same ideas as those implied in the original text. The second is the sociolinguistic disparity between the original English dialects and the Spanish dialects chosen in the translations. We should also consider that attitudes to the social place of women have evolved in the century since Pygmalion was first published. In this paper I show the different “Elizas” which are presented in the different Spanish editions of Pygmalion.

Developing informed consent materials for non-English-speaking participants: An analysis of four professional firm translations from English to Spanish.

Background/Aims:An increasing body of research is being conducted with non-English-speaking subjects. Study-related materials, including those essential for obtaining informed consent, must often be translated from English into other languages. In this study, we sought to examine the types of issues that may arise when consent materials are translated from English to Spanish.Methods:Drawing on expertise from five individuals associated with our research team, four of whom are native Spanish speakers of different dialects of Spanish, we crafted translations of our own consent materials for biobanking using a rigorous, multi-step process involving both forward and back translation. We then systematically compared our translations to those produced by four professional translation firms to identify potential concerns in our own and the professional translations.Results:We identified three primary types of problems of relevance for researchers conducting studies where translation of written information is required. These included nonequivalent registers (in particular, the introduction of more complicated language), errors of omission (reducing the clarity of the information), and changes that altered the substantive meaning of the information.Conclusion:Our findings highlight the importance of working with translators who not only possess “textbook” knowledge of both languages but also an appreciation of the sociocultural factors that affect how people interpret and understand meaning. Moreover, translators who have a basic understanding of research are more likely to accurately convey essential research concepts. We describe a series of steps researchers can take that may help to improve the quality of translated materials.

Phrasing and nuclear configurations in authentic English-accented Spanish

This paper examines the differences in the division of intonation phrases and in the tonal structure of the nuclear configuration (i.e., the last pitch accent and the following boundary tone) in imitated and in authentic English-accented Spanish. The same Spanish text was read by four native speakers of American English, who produced the text with a real English foreign accent in Spanish, and six native speakers of Spanish, who read the text twice: in L1 Spanish and in fake English-accented Spanish. An auditory analysis of the data was carried out along with an inspection of the f0 traces aligned with the spectrographic representation and the segmental string. The results showed that the Spanish speakers produce more intonation breaks when they imitate an English accent in Spanish than when they speak L1 Spanish. Furthermore, they adopt the typical tonal structure of Spanish final accents in their fake English-accented productions. The number of prosodic breaks in real and in imitated English-accented Spanish is similar. The nuclear configurations, on the other hand, present more variability and differ in the frequency of occurrence of some patterns. The high occurrence of the fall-rise pattern (L+H* LH%) and the presence of the high-fall contour (L+H* L%) in the English productions may help discriminate an authentic English-accented Spanish from a fake one.

Deterioro Cognitivo Leve: del concepto a la planificación de ejercicio físico

Introducción: El envejecimiento implica una vulnerabilidad en el estado cognitivo debido a modificaciones funcionales y estructurales del cerebro. El objetivo de esta revisión fue brindar herramientas en la estructura, forma y elaboración de una intervención fisioterapéutica adecuada al sujeto con Deterioro Cognitivo Leve (DCL) basada en ejercicio y otros aspectos relevantes 
 
 Metodología: Se recopiló material bibliográfico de fuentes científicas primarias mediante la búsqueda en SciELO, MEDLINE. Se consideraron aquellas publicaciones escritas en idioma español e ingles, publicados del 2010 al 2018, utilizando los siguientes descriptores: neurogénesis, ejercicio y disfunción cognitiva. Se hallaron 65 artículos, de los cuales, después de una exhaustiva revisión se consideraron 29. Los mismos con un nivel de evidencia según Sackett entre I y III. 
 
 Discusión de Resultados: El ejercicio físico multimodal ha sido objeto de estudio debido a sus beneficios a nivel cerebral, como la sinaptogénesis, el mejoramiento de la vascularidad cerebral, optimización en redes atencionales, y favorecer los rendimientos cognitivos. Estos beneficios son proporcionales al tiempo de ejercicio realizado y pueden derivar en la mejoría del DCL en pacientes de ambos sexos y de cualquier edad. Se plantea un modelo de sesiones de ejercicio físico, flexible y sencillo que puede utilizarse por un profesional en terapia física para el abordaje del sujeto con DCL. 
 
 Conclusión: El ejercicio prescrito y supervisado por un profesional en terapia física trae beneficios no solo en el individuo con DCL, sino también en toda su red de apoyo y en los servicios de salud.

A tradução de expressões idiomáticas presentes na dublagem do seriado “El Chavo del 8” para o ensino de espanhol como língua estrangeira

Idioms are formulaic constructions specific to each language and culture that, in the field of teaching a foreign language, deserve special attention. The unconscious translation process performed by students in the classroom should conflict when literally translating such expressions, because not all of them have a grammatically and syntactically similar equivalent in the target language. In this article, we try to offer a theoretical basis that will help teachers understand how to position themselves in front of students when teaching idioms in Spanish and how to approach this content. To achieve this, we are based on the definition of idioms given by Dicionario Priberam da Lingua Portuguesa, on the theoretical basis of idiomatic expression (XATARA, 1998), equivalence (HURTADO ALBIR, 2001), levels of learning of idiomatic expressions (RIOS, 2010), and translation in the acquisition of foreign languages (HARBORD, 1992). To help with this process, we present fifteen examples of Spanish idioms extracted from nine episodes of the Mexican series El Chavo del 8, with their respective meanings and equivalences in Portuguese.

Conceptualization and representation of the passing of time in Spanish phraseology: A gender study

Abstract According to the cognitive linguistics approach to phraseology, the majority of idioms are not linguistic but conceptual in nature. Moreover, they have to be seen mainly as a cultural product and, consequently, they are a splendid device for revealing the values of a given society. The aim of this study is to reveal the notion of the passing of time, as it is differently conceptualized for women and men in Spanish phraseology. Additionally, their dissimilar representations via linear structures based on the TIME IS SPACE conceptual metaphor will be proposed. The main conclusion of the study is that, according to Spanish idioms, men’s lives can be represented by a single-line structure divided into two opposite, isolated periods – childhood and maturity. On the contrary, women’s linear representation looks more like a continuous line that becomes a “forked” path a short time after women leave childhood behind. Finally, the relationship between the contemporary functioning of PUs and the endurance of the etymological stereotypes underlying these expressions will be considered.

'Parecen que lo olvidan': Plurals did it again

The distribution of DDPP in raising constructions –depending on the embedded clause’s formal properties– has been essential for Case Theory and movement. Likewise, the behavior of DDPP, according to agreement facts, has given rise to relevant discussions about the kind of movement involved (A-Movement/A’-Movement). Nevertheless, this distribution is not so clear in certain Spanish dialects, which shows a double agreement effects. It means that the embedded verb as well as the raising verb (parecer ‘to seem’) present inflectional number (and person) morphology: Parece-n que lo olvida-n (seem.3PL that it forget.3PL ‘They seem to forget him’). The analysis of the data in these varieties allows us to define many characteristics which are relevant from a descriptive and a theoretical point of view. Descriptively, it is possible to identify some notable particularities, with respect to the position of the DP, which triggers agreement and the interaction of these constructions with dative experiencers as well (Me parece que... ‘It seems to me that...’). From a theoretical point of view, these data have consequences for approaches on agreement, on the relationship between Case and movement, and on the discussion regarding the Experiencer Paradox in Spanish. Additionally, they allow us to identify a new empirical domain in which a DP plural number feature has an active role in the Probe-Goal domain.

The contribution of prosody to foreign accent: A study of Spanish as a foreign language

The aim of this study is to analyze the contribution of prosody on the perception of foreign accent by Brazilian learners of Spanish. The data were collected from 15 participants and a control group of 5 native Spanish speakers. A perceptual test was performed with two different speech styles (reading and storytelling) and with delexicalized and natural speech. The speech production was judged by 24 native Spanish subjects. First, they had to determine the nationality of the speaker by listening to the delexicalized excerpts in Spanish (storytelling). After that, the listeners used a continuous scale to rate the excerpts (reading and storytelling) for the degree of foreign accent in Spanish. The results suggest that it is possible to identify foreign accent only with the prosodic information provided in the delexicalized stimuli, i.e., f0, duration, and overall intensity. In addition, the perceptual test allowed us to assess the degree of foreign accent of each subject while revealing the great variability of their production. Finally, concerning the external data, the following factors predicted foreign accent among the learners: gender, length of residence in Spain, formal language instruction in Brazil, age of arrival in Spain, and reported use of Brazilian Portuguese in Spain. These results confirm the crucial role of naturalistic learning of a foreign language, as shown by previous studies.

Revisiting the Null Subject Parameter: New Insights from Afro-Peruvian Spanish

With the advent of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), the prevailing view of linguistic variation and contrast within universal Grammar has undergone a shift from rigidly defined parameters ˗associated with clusters of properties (Chomsky 1981; Chomsky & Lasnik 1993)˗ to an approach in which features play a central role, are flexibly distributed, and originate in the lexicon, according to what Baker (2008) calls the Borer-Chomsky conjecture (Borer 1984; Chomsky 2001). A closer cross linguistic look at empirical data seems to support this change in focus. The Null Subject Parameter (NSP) (Chomsky 1981; Rizzi 1982), as originally formulated, had a number of shortcomings (cf. Huang 1994; Holmberg 2005). Within the realm of Spanish and Portuguese, two dialects that do not follow the predictions of the NSP are Dominican Spanish (DS) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The analysis of these varieties has led to the postulation of new hypotheses to account for their unexpected syntactic patterns (cf. Duarte 1993; Toribio 2000; Camacho 2008; etc.). The present study pays attention to yet another dialect of Spanish that does not conform to the NSP, Chinchano Spanish (CS), an Afro-Hispanic variety spoken in Chincha, Peru. In so doing, this paper provides an analysis of null and overt subjects that partially deviates from previous accounts of similar pro-drop phenomena. Additionally, this study proposes a model of contact-induced language transmission that explains why CS –as well as many other Afro-Hispanic languages of the Americas (AHLAs)– presents patterns that do not align this dialect with either null-subject languages (NSLs) like Italian or non-null-subject languages (NNSLs) like English.

Review of Spanish Dialects Meeting

Review of Spanish Dialects Meeting

Processing and Comprehension of Accented Speech by Monolingual and Bilingual Children

ABSTRACTThis study tested the effect of Spanish-accented speech on sentence comprehension in children with different degrees of Spanish experience. The hypothesis was that earlier acquisition of Spanish would be associated with enhanced comprehension of Spanish-accented speech. Three groups of 5–6-year-old children were tested: monolingual English-speaking children, simultaneous Spanish-English bilingual children, and early English-Spanish bilingual children. The children completed a semantic judgment task in English on semantically meaningful and nonsensical sentences produced by a native English speaker and a native Spanish speaker characterized by a strong Spanish accent. All children were slower to respond to foreign accented speech, independent of language background. Monolingual and early bilingual children showed reduced comprehension accuracy of accented speech, but only for nonsensical sentences. Simultaneous bilingual children performed similarly to other groups for meaningful contexts, but were not as strongly affected by accent for nonsensical contexts. Together, the findings suggest that children’s language background has only a minor influence on processing of accented speech.

Do Varieties of Spanish Influence U.S. Spanish-English Bilingual Children's Friendship Judgments?

Latinos are the largest minority group in the United States (U.S. Census, 2014), yet this term comprises individuals from multiple ethnicities who speak distinct varieties of Spanish. We investigated whether Spanish-English bilingual children (N=140, ages 4-17) use Spanish varieties in their social judgments. The findings revealed that children distinguished varieties of Spanish but did not use Spanish dialects to make third-person friendship judgments until 10-12years; this effect became stronger in adolescence. In contrast, young children (4-6years) made friendship judgments based on a speaker's language (English, Spanish). Thus, using language varieties as a social category and as a basis for making social inferences is a complex result of multiple influences for Spanish-speaking children growing up bilingual in the United States.

Vowel acoustics in three dialects of Spanish: Iberian, Dominican, and Mexican

A growing number of studies have begun to investigate vowel variability among Spanish speakers. The purpose of this study was to measure the acoustics of vowels in three dialects of Spanish and to compare how these dialects vary in their vowel production. This information is important for speech and language clinicians working with dialectally diverse individuals to recognize the difference between typical dialectal variation and a speech/language disorder. We specifically examined dialects that have developed separately from each other and also have large numbers of speakers. Data were obtained from five female speakers in each of these groups: Iberian speakers, Dominican speakers, and Mexican speakers (N = 15). To analyze the effect of speaking task on production variation, we elicited a controlled speaking task and a naturalistic speaking task. For the controlled task, the participants were asked to read aloud randomized phrases on a computer screen. For the naturalistic task, participants were presented with a simple map from which to give navigation instructions. The results showed differences in average vowel placement and token-to-token variability. These data disprove previous hypotheses that vowels are stable across Spanish dialects.

Variable production and indexical social meaning: On the potential physiological origin of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rican Spanish

Abstract In several dialects of Spanish, men tend to exhibit more intervocalic /s/ voicing than women, e. g., oso ‘bear’ as [ozo], and this difference may have a physiological basis. File-Muriel et al. (2015, Disentangling the physiological from the socially-learned in gradient, sociophonetic processes: Evidence from s-realization in Barranquilla, Colombia. Unpublished manuscript) found that vocal tract size conditions /s/ aspiration in Barranquilla, and Nadeu and Hualde (2013, Reinterpretation of biomechanics as gender-conditioned variation in the origin of diachronic intervocalic voicing. Available at http://washo.uchicago.edu/pub/workshop/nadeu.pdf) contend that speakers with larger vocal tracts may have greater difficulty controlling vocal fold cessation. The present work serves as a continuation of these studies, utilizing 18 sociolinguistic interviews to determine (i) what factors are most predictive of intervocalic [z] in Costa Rica and (ii) whether physiology can potentially explain its origin. The results of a statistical analysis using 1,647 tokens of /s/ show that both gender and physiological factors significantly condition voicing (p < 0.001), with more voicing in men’s speech, as F2 decreases, and as f0 decreases. However, one would expect more gradient voicing in men’s speech if physiological factors caused the gender-based voicing difference, but women voice more gradiently while men produce higher rates of 0 % and 100 % voicing. We conclude that while physiological factors may have been its original source, non-physiological factors currently condition /s/-voicing in Costa Rica, with male speakers aiming for categorical targets for social motivations.