Late Spanish-English Bilinguals Research Articles

L1 grammatical attrition in late Spanish-English bilinguals in the UK: aspectual interpretations of present tense in Spanish

ABSTRACT This article sheds light on the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that determine the likelihood of L1 grammatical attrition in late sequential bilinguals. We explore whether aspectual interpretations associated with the present tense may be a vulnerable area for the native grammar of 30 late Spanish-English bilinguals who have settled in the UK for over 15 years. Attrition of this property in L1 Spanish grammars has been reported by Cuza (2010. On the L1 attrition of the Spanish present tense. Hispania 93, no. 2: 256–272. doi:10.1353/hpn.2010.a382874) for Spanish-English bilinguals in the USA and Canada. Our finding of no attrition for UK-based Spanish bilinguals suggests that in Cuza’s study, attrition may be mediated by dialectal variation in the L1 in the North American context, where Spanish is a widespread and visible community language. Further, we ascribe the absence of attrition to a specific characteristic of the grammatical distinction between the L1 and L2: where the L2 grammar provides options representing only a subset of the options available to the L1 for the corresponding grammatical property, attrition may be disfavoured.

Interprofessional learning to enhance Spanish communication skills in Latinx pharmacy students

This case study focuses on an interdisciplinary educational experience in which university Pharmacy and Humanities early and late Spanish-English bilinguals were paired to translate questions related to sociobehavioral aspects of medication use. This work describes the personal and professional benefits reported by the translators and the prevailing themes from verbal negotiations. The participants were an undergraduate in Spanish, seven pharmacy professional doctorate students, and five Hispanic studies graduate students. After completing individual translations, students were paired and met virtually to create a final, collaborative version of their translation. Participants were subsequently invited to answer open-ended questions about their experience. Translators’ transcribed interactions and questionnaire responses became the basis for this article. Results show that the main reported perceived benefit was the participants’ improved language skills. The findings also suggest that length, quality, and richness of interactions depended on whether the members of the pairings exhibited mutual respect, curiosity, and empathy.

Perception of temporally contrasted Japanese words by Spanish-English bilinguals and American English monolinguals.

Japanese and English use temporal cues within vowels, suggesting an audio-processing advantage for temporally-cued contrasts, while Spanish does not. Using a categorial AXB discrimination task, this study investigated how American English-speaking monolinguals and early and late Spanish-English bilinguals perceive three types of temporally-contrasting Japanese pairs: vowel length (kado/kaado), consonant length (iken/ikken), and syllable number (hjaku/hijaku). All groups performed worse than Japanese controls for the vowel length and syllable number contrasts, but only early bilinguals differed from controls for consonant length. This research contributes to a better understanding of how the first-learned language influences speech perception in a second language.

Inhibitory and facilitatory effects of phonological and orthographic similarity on L2 word recognition across modalities in bilinguals

Language perception studies on bilinguals often show that words that share form and meaning across languages (cognates) are easier to process than words that share only meaning. This facilitatory phenomenon is known as the cognate effect. Most previous studies have shown this effect visually, whereas the auditory modality as well as the interplay between type of similarity and modality remain largely unexplored. In this study, highly proficient late Spanish–English bilinguals carried out a lexical decision task in their second language, both visually and auditorily. Words had high or low phonological and orthographic similarity, fully crossed. We also included orthographically identical words (perfect cognates). Our results suggest that similarity in the same modality (i.e., orthographic similarity in the visual modality and phonological similarity in the auditory modality) leads to improved signal detection, whereas similarity across modalities hinders it. We provide support for the idea that perfect cognates are a special category within cognates. Results suggest a need for a conceptual and practical separation between types of similarity in cognate studies. The theoretical implication is that the representations of items are active in both modalities of the non-target language during language processing, which needs to be incorporated to our current processing models.

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

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.

Perceptual discrimination measure of non-native phoneme perception in early and late Spanish-English and Japanese-English bilinguals

This study examined speech discrimination of English vowels /ɑ/ (as in “hot”), /ʌ/ (as in “hut”), and /æ/ (as in “hat”) by non-native English speakers, using an AXB discrimination task. Previous research shows that a person’s first language (L1) changes how speech is perceived in a second learned language (L2). Spanish and Japanese were chosen for this study because both languages share the same five spectrally different vowels, but Japanese additionally distinguishes between short and long versions of those five vowels. L2 proficiency and/or amount of L2 input were used as additional predictor variables. The target populations were early and late Spanish-English bilinguals and early and late Japanese-English bilinguals, which were compared to a control group of monolingual American English speakers. We are currently collecting data and based on previous studies (Shafer et al., under review), we predict: (1) monolinguals and early-bilinguals will show better performance than late-bilinguals; (2) discrimination of /ʌ/ vs. /æ/ contrast will be easier than other contrasts, /ʌ/ vs. /ɑ/ and /ɑ/ vs. /æ/. Our findings will address how L1 spectral-temporal cues and L2 age of acquisition affect L2 speech perception.

The Neural Correlates of Conflict Detection and Resolution During Multiword Lexical Selection: Evidence from Bilinguals and Monolinguals.

Previous studies have identified the Event Related Potential (ERP) components of conflict detection and resolution mechanisms in tasks requiring lexical selection at the individual word level. We investigated the brain potentials associated with these mechanisms in a lexical selection task based on multiword units made up of verb–noun combinations (e.g., eat breakfast, skip school). Native and non-native English speakers were asked to select a familiarized target verb–noun sequence (eat breakfast) between two choices. Trials were low-conflict, with only one plausible candidate (e.g., eat – shoot – breakfast) or high-conflict, with two plausible verbs (e.g., eat – skip – breakfast). Following the presentation of the noun, native English speakers showed a biphasic process of selection, with a conflict-detection centro-parietal negativity between 500 and 600 ms (Ninc), followed by a right frontal effect (RFE) between 600 and 800 ms preceding responses. Late Spanish–English bilinguals showed a similar but more sustained and more widespread effect. Additionally, brain activity was only significantly correlated with performance in native speakers. Results suggest largely similar basic mechanisms, but also that different resources and strategies are engaged by non-native speakers when resolving conflict in the weaker language, with a greater focus on individual words than on multiword units.

Perception of American-English Vowels by Early and Late Spanish-English Bilinguals.

Increasing numbers of Hispanic immigrants are entering the US and learning American-English (AE) as a second language (L2). Previous studies investigating the relationship between AE and Spanish vowels have revealed an advantage for early L2 learners for their accuracy of L2 vowel perception. Replicating and extending such previous research, this study examined the patterns with which early and late Spanish-English bilingual adults assimilated naturally-produced AE vowels to their native vowel inventory and the accuracy with which they discriminated the vowels. Twelve early Spanish-English bilingual, 12 late Spanish-English bilingual, and 10 monolingual listeners performed perceptual-assimilation and categorical-discrimination tasks involving AE /i,ɪ,ɛ,ʌ,æ,ɑ,o/. Early bilinguals demonstrated similar assimilation patterns to late bilinguals. Late bilinguals' discrimination was less accurate than early bilinguals' and AE monolinguals'. Certain contrasts, such as /æ-ɑ/, /ʌ-ɑ/, and /ʌ-æ/, were particularly difficult to discriminate for both bilingual groups. Consistent with previous research, findings suggest that early L2 learning heightens Spanish-English bilinguals' ability to perceive cross-language phonetic differences. However, even early bilinguals' native-vowel system continues to influence their L2 perception.

Now you hear it, now you don't: Malleable illusory vowel effects in Spanish–English bilinguals

Spanish speakers tend to perceive an illusory [e] preceding word-initial [s]-consonant sequences, e.g., perceiving [stið] as [estið] (Cuetos, Hallé, Domínguez & Segui, 2011), but this illusion is weaker for Spanish speakers who know English, which lacks the illusion (Carlson, Goldrick, Blasingame & Fink, 2016). The present study aimed to shed light on why this occurs by assessing how a brief interval spent using English impacts performance in Spanish auditory discrimination and lexical decision. Late Spanish–English bilinguals’ pattern of responses largely matched that of monolinguals, but their response times revealed significant differences between monolinguals and bilinguals, and between bilinguals who had just completed tasks in English vs. Spanish. These results suggest that late bilinguals do not simply learn to perceive initial [s]-consonant sequences veridically, but that elements of both their phonotactic systems interact dynamically during speech perception, as listeners work to identify what it was they just heard.

Asymmetrical interlingual influence in the production of Spanish and English laterals as a result of competing activation in bilingual language processing

This study examines the phonetic and phonological knowledge of Spanish and English /l/ by early and late Spanish-English bilinguals along a continuum of language dominance. Forty early Spanish-English bilinguals, divided into groups as a function of their immigrant generation (G1.5, G2, G3), and twenty L2 Spanish learners produced word-initial and word-final laterals in three separate sessions: monolingual Spanish session, monolingual English session, and bilingual Spanish/English session. Results indicate that all participants acquired the phonetic and allophonic characteristics of the lateral variants in each language, and that language dominance strongly predicts these bilinguals’ acoustic realization of Spanish and English laterals. The acoustic analyses reveal phonetic convergence as a result of language mode, but it is especially the laterals in the non-dominant language that are altered in bilingual mode. This study provides evidence of language dominance effects on the acoustic realization of Spanish and English laterals, and demonstrates the impact of language mode on the phonetic abilities of early and late bilinguals. It is proposed that a model of bilingual processing based on the principles of episodic frameworks, in which exemplars in a bilingual lexicon develop connections across languages and lexical processing activates the words of both languages non-selectively, can explain these findings.

Neurophysiological indices of the effect of cognates on vowel perception in late Spanish-English bilinguals

It is well established that acquiring a second language (L2) later in life results in less accurate production and perception of speech sounds in the L2. An interesting question is to what extent phonological similarity of translation equivalents across the first language (L1) and L2 affects speech-sound processing and lexical access in an L2.The present study examined this question by comparing processing of Spanish-English translation equivalents that either were phonologically similar (cognates) or dissimilar (non-cognates) in fifteen monolingual English-speakers and 15 late Spanish-English bilinguals. Event related potentials (ERP) were used to examine whether late L2-learners had more difficulty discriminating mispronunciations of vowels in English words that have Spanish cognates compared to words that do not have cognates. Behavioral results indicated effects of language background and cognate status on discrimination, with bilinguals showing poorer discrimination of English vowel mispronunciations than the American-English monolingual control group. ERP results revealed that cognate words facilitated L2 phonological processing as evidenced by a larger frontal positive component (P400) ERP effect, similar in amplitude to the P400 from monolinguals. Results suggest that cognate words facilitate speech processing in adult L2 learners, and, thus, may also be useful as a tool for perceptual learning of L2 phonology.

Making Room for Second Language Phonotactics: Effects of L2 Learning and Environment on First Language Speech Perception.

Language-specific restrictions on sound sequences in words can lead to automatic perceptual repair of illicit sound sequences. As an example, no Spanish words begin with /s/-consonant sequences ([#sC]), and where necessary (e.g., foreign loanwords) [#sC] is repaired by inserting an initial [e], (e.g. foreign loanwords, cf., esnob, from English snob). As a result, Spanish speakers tend to perceive an illusory [e] before [#sC] sequences. Interestingly, this perceptual illusion is weaker in early Spanish-English bilinguals, whose other language, English, allows [#sC]. The present study explored whether this apparent influence of the English language on Spanish is restricted to early bilinguals, whose early language experience includes a mixture of both languages, or whether later learning of second language (L2) English can also induce a weakening of the first language (L1) perceptual illusion. Two groups of late Spanish-English bilinguals, immersed in Spanish or English, were tested on the same Spanish AX (same-different) discrimination task used in a study by Carlson et al., (2016) and their results compared with the Spanish monolinguals from Carlson et al.'s study. Like early bilinguals, late bilinguals exhibited a reduced impact of perceptual prothesis on discrimination accuracy. Additionally, late bilinguals, particularly in English immersion, were slowest when responding against the Spanish perceptual illusion. Robust L1 perceptual illusions thus appear to be malleable in the face of later L2 learning. It is argued that these results are consonant with the need for late bilinguals to navigate alternative, conflicting representations of the same acoustic material, even in unilingual L1 speech perception tasks.

Vowel reduction in word-final position by early and late Spanish-English bilinguals.

Vowel reduction is a prominent feature of American English, as well as other stress-timed languages. As a phonological process, vowel reduction neutralizes multiple vowel quality contrasts in unstressed syllables. For bilinguals whose native language is not characterized by large spectral and durational differences between tonic and atonic vowels, systematically reducing unstressed vowels to the central vowel space can be problematic. Failure to maintain this pattern of stressed-unstressed syllables in American English is one key element that contributes to a “foreign accent” in second language speakers. Reduced vowels, or “schwas,” have also been identified as particularly vulnerable to the co-articulatory effects of adjacent consonants. The current study examined the effects of adjacent sounds on the spectral and temporal qualities of schwa in word-final position. Three groups of English-speaking adults were tested: Miami-based monolingual English speakers, early Spanish-English bilinguals, and late Spanish-English bilinguals. Subjects performed a reading task to examine their schwa productions in fluent speech when schwas were preceded by consonants from various points of articulation. Results indicated that monolingual English and late Spanish-English bilingual groups produced targeted vowel qualities for schwa, whereas early Spanish-English bilinguals lacked homogeneity in their vowel productions. This extends prior claims that schwa is targetless for F2 position for native speakers to highly-proficient bilingual speakers. Though spectral qualities lacked homogeneity for early Spanish-English bilinguals, early bilinguals produced schwas with near native-like vowel duration. In contrast, late bilinguals produced schwas with significantly longer durations than English monolinguals or early Spanish-English bilinguals. Our results suggest that the temporal properties of a language are better integrated into second language phonologies than spectral qualities. Finally, we examined the role of nonstructural variables (e.g. linguistic history measures) in predicting native-like vowel duration. These factors included: Age of L2 learning, amount of L1 use, and self-reported bilingual dominance. Our results suggested that different sociolinguistic factors predicted native-like reduced vowel duration than predicted native-like vowel qualities across multiple phonetic environments.

The processing of the object markeraby heritage Spanish speakers

Objectives:Previous research has found that object marking with the Spanish particle a is variable among heritage Spanish speakers, based on data from offline experimental measures. The online self-paced reading method used for the present study has the advantage of being less metalinguistic, which may be important with heritage speakers. This incremental measure of sentence processing can also examine whether the single letter form a is simply skipped over during reading.Methodology:Thirty-two heritage Spanish speakers and 16 later Spanish-English bilinguals participated. Critical stimuli were 20 items testing a marking with direct objects and 20 items testing a marking of indirect objects in ditransitive constructions.Data and analysis:The data set included reading times from self-paced reading, accuracy for post-stimulus comprehension questions, and secondary data from an offline acceptability judgment, all of which were analyzed via ANOVAs by subject and by item.Findings:Both groups exhibited robust sensitivity to a marking of indirect objects, sensitivity to a marking with inanimate direct objects, and no sensitivity to a marking with animate direct objects.Originality:This is the first study to examine the real-time processing of object marking among heritage Spanish speakers. It is the second study to include a comparison group of late Spanish-English bilinguals in the US, as opposed to monolinguals residing abroad.Significance:Incremental data from online processing indicate that the visual nonsalience of the marker a is not the sole or primary cause of variability in the marking of animate direct objects, because it was noticed in other written sentential contexts. In addition, the similarity between the two participant groups shows that variability with differential object marking is not limited to heritage speakers, but can also occur among US Spanish users educated abroad, where incomplete acquisition is not a question.

Differences in the Association between Segment and Language: Early Bilinguals Pattern with Monolinguals and Are Less Accurate than Late Bilinguals.

Early bilinguals often show as much sensitivity to L2-specific contrasts as monolingual speakers of the L2, but most work on cross-language speech perception has focused on isolated segments, and typically only on neighboring vowels or stop contrasts. In tasks that include sounds in context, listeners’ success is more variable, so segment discrimination in isolation may not adequately represent the phonetic detail in stored representations. The current study explores the relationship between language experience and sensitivity to segmental cues in context by comparing the categorization patterns of monolingual English listeners and early and late Spanish–English bilinguals. Participants categorized nonce words containing different classes of English- and Spanish-specific sounds as being more English-like or more Spanish-like; target segments included phonemic cues, cues for which there is no analogous sound in the other language, or phonetic cues, cues for which English and Spanish share the category but for which each language varies in its phonetic implementation. Listeners’ language categorization accuracy and reaction times were analyzed. Our results reveal a largely uniform categorization pattern across listener groups: Spanish cues were categorized more accurately than English cues, and phonemic cues were easier for listeners to categorize than phonetic cues. There were no differences in the sensitivity of monolinguals and early bilinguals to language-specific cues, suggesting that the early bilinguals’ exposure to Spanish did not fundamentally change their representations of English phonology. However, neither did the early bilinguals show more sensitivity than the monolinguals to Spanish sounds. The late bilinguals however, were significantly more accurate than either of the other groups. These findings indicate that listeners with varying exposure to English and Spanish are able to use language-specific cues in a nonce-word language categorization task. Differences in how, and not only when, a language was acquired may influence listener sensitivity to more difficult cues, and the advantage for phonemic cues may reflect the greater salience of categories unique to each language. Implications for foreign-accent categorization and cross-language speech perception are discussed, and future directions are outlined to better understand how salience varies across language-specific phonemic and phonetic cues.

Spanish-influenced rhythm in Miami English

This study found that monolingual English speakers from Miami speak an English variety influenced by Spanish. In this study, speech from Miami English monolinguals, English monolinguals not from Miami, and early and late Spanish-English bilinguals were collected, and rhythm metrics (Ramus et al., 1999) were compared between groups. Surprisingly, results also suggest that Miami English monolinguals with English-speaking parents and from neighborhoods with a lower Hispanic population may be leading this change. These results support Labov’s (2014) claim that children may reject features of their parent language (in this case, English) when the speech community is highly stratified.

Preposition Stranding in Spanish as a Heritage Language

Previous research examining heritage speaker bilingualism has suggested that interfaceconditioned properties are likely to be affected by crosslinguistic influence (e.g., Montrul & Polinsky, 2011; White, 2011). It is not clear, however, whether the core syntax can also be affected to the same degree (e.g., Cuza, 2013; Depiante & Thompson, 2013). Departing from Cuza’s (2013) and Depiante and Thompson’s (2013) research, the present study seeks to determine the extent to which this is possible in the case of Spanish as a heritage language. With this goal in mind, a total of thirty-three Spanish heritage speakers (divided into sequential and simultaneous bilinguals) and a comparison group of eleven late Spanish-English bilinguals completed a battery of off-line tasks that examined knowledge and use of preposition stranding (i.e., a syntactic construction whereby the object of the preposition is fronted while the preposition itself is left stranded), an understudied core syntactic phenomenon that is licit in English but precluded in Spanish. Overall findings reveal that the sequential heritage speakers pattern with participants from the control group. The simultaneous heritage speakers, on the other hand, seem to have a grammar that is not so restricting as they accept and produce ungrammatical cases of preposition stranding. Herein, we argue that these results do not obtain the way they do due to incomplete acquisition or L1 attrition but crucially because of the timing of exposure to the societal language. We propose that this property was completely acquired, although differently acquired due to the structural overlap observed between the two languages involved (e.g., Müller & Hulk, 2001), and most importantly, to the timing of acquisition of English (e.g., Putnam & Sánchez, 2013).

Listener sensitivity to English- and Spanish-specific sounds in a language categorization task

Listeners are able to distinguish native from non-native speech with as little as 30 ms of input (Flege, 1984; Kondaurova & Francis, 2008), suggesting that listeners’ mental representations include fine-grained acoustic detail about typical and atypical pronunciations in their native language. The current study considers the relative contribution of different language-specific sounds to listeners’ language categorization. English monolinguals and early and late Spanish-English bilinguals categorized nonce words containing a language-specific target segment as belonging to English or Spanish. Target segments included the English phonemes /θ, ɹ/, the Spanish phoneme /r/, and the Spanish and English versions of /l, u/, which exist in both languages but vary in their phonetic implementation. All listeners accurately categorized stimuli with /ɹ, r/ and the Spanish pronunciations of /l, u/. English /θ/ and /l, u/ variants received more mixed responses. For these more difficult sounds, late bilinguals were more accurate than the other groups. Early bilinguals responded faster than the other groups to stimuli with language-specific phonemes, and both bilingual groups responded more quickly than monolinguals to /l, u/. The results reveal that the bilinguals’ experience with both languages enhances their sensitivity to language-specific cues and may lead to more detailed sound representations for their languages.

On-line relative clause attachment strategy in heritage speakers of Spanish

Aims: Previous research on relative clause attachment has found that late Spanish–English bilinguals tend to parse both languages with a single strategy that is consistent with that of the language in which they are currently immersed. One recent investigation using an off-line measure has suggested that the same may not be true of early Spanish–English bilinguals, who did not show effects of greater exposure to English in the comprehension of ambiguous relative clauses (RCs). The present study sought to determine whether on-line RC attachment behavior in heritage Spanish was similarly unaffected by extensive exposure to English. Design: Forty-six monolinguals and 28 heritage speakers of Mexican Spanish participated in a self-paced reading experiment in which stimuli contained temporarily ambiguous relative clauses that were biased toward either high or low syntactic attachment. Data and analysis: Analysis of variance by subject and by item was performed on reading time data and on responses to post-stimulus comprehension questions. Findings: Statistical analyses revealed similar preferences for high attachment in Spanish among both monolinguals and heritage speakers. Originality: These results suggest that Spanish heritage speakers, as early bilinguals, may be less affected by ongoing exposure to English than the late bilinguals tested in prior studies. Significance: The outcome also suggests that, within Spanish as a heritage language, relative clause attachment may be unique compared to other aspects of sentence processing in that it shows little influence from English.

Durational variability of schwa in early and late Spanish–English bilinguals

Aims: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether bilinguals categorically displayed shorter or longer schwa durations between fixed word pairs where one word contains a deletable syllable and the other does not (as in “rational” [ræʃənəl] → [ræʃnəl] compared with “rationality” [ræʃənæləti]). We hypothesized that monolingual and early bilingual speakers would produce shorter values for “deletable” schwas whereas late bilinguals would not. Methodology: Twenty native English speakers and 40 Miami-based Spanish–English bilinguals (20 early and 20 late bilinguals) were asked to read sentences containing target words from 10 semantically related word pairs. Analysis: A three-way mixed model ANOVA was performed to determine the relationship between schwa duration and the following factors: language group, word root, and deletable/non-deletable category. Pairwise t-tests were also performed on individual categories to determine if semantically related pairs differed in duration. Conclusions: Results indicated that native English speakers produce significantly shorter durations for schwa in deletable versus non-deletable position. Early bilingual productions are very similar to those of English-only speakers, whereas late bilinguals display much longer durations in both categories. Originality: This study is the first to directly compare word-internal vowel duration patterns in Spanish–English bilingual speakers. Implications: These results indicate that age of L2 acquisition is a predictive factor in determining how native-like an L2 speaker’s pronunciation of reduced vowels will be. Limitations: Given the specific nature of the word pairs tested, a reading instrument was the most efficient manner of eliciting target word pairs. Future studies should try to evaluate this issue using other types of stimuli.