Spanish-English Bilingual Speakers Research Articles

Perceptual representation of speaker gender in Spanish-English bilingual listeners

The perceptual representation of speaker gender in monolingual English listeners has been found to be gradient and 2-dimensional. However, both gender expression and listener attribution of a speaker’s gender are known to vary by cultural and linguistic norms. Thus, listeners’ attribution of a speaker’s gender is expected to vary based on the cultural and linguistic practices of their community. This study examined the perceptual representation of speaker gender in Spanish-English bilingual listeners at the U.S./Mexico border of El Paso, TX. Twenty-four Spanish-English bilingual speakers of diverse gender identities (e.g., cisgender men, cisgender women, and transgender women) were audio recorded reading sentences from the English and Spanish versions of the Hearing in Noise Test. Nineteen cisgender Spanish-English bilingual listeners completed an auditory free classification paradigm, in which they classified speakers by perceived general similarity and gender identity in both Spanish and English conditions. Multidimensional scaling of listeners’ classifications in each language revealed that listeners organized speakers in a more expansive perceptual space in English (3 dimensions) as compared to Spanish (2 dimensions). Dimension weightings indicated that, in Spanish, listeners placed more emphasis on Dimension 1 as compared to Dimension 2 when classifying speakers, while, in English, listeners equally weighted the 3 dimensions.

39 Perceived Workload and Language Order Effects on the Cordoba Naming Test in Spanish-English Bilinguals

Objective:The Cordoba Naming Test (CNT) is a 30-item confrontation naming task. The administration of the CNT can be administered in multiple languages. Hardy and Wright (2018) conditionally validated a measure of perceived mental workload called the National Aeronautic Space Administration Task Load Index (NASA-TLX). They found that workload ratings on the NASA-TLX increased with increased demands on a cognitive task. Researchers found interactions in a study examining language proficiency and language (i.e., in which the test was administered) on several tasks of the Golden Stroop Test. Their results revealed that unbalanced bilinguals’ best-spoken language showed significantly better results compared to balanced bilinguals’ where language use did not matter. To our knowledge, no study has examined the order effects of Spanish-English bilingual speakers’ CNT performance and perceived workloads when completed in Spanish first compared to English second and vice-versa. We predicted that persons that completed the CNT in English first would demonstrate better performances and report lower perceived workloads on the CNT compared to completing the CNT in Spanish second. In addition, we predicted that persons that completed the CNT in Spanish first would demonstrate worse performance and higher perceived workloads on the CNT compared to completing the CNT in English second.Participants and Methods:The sample consisted of 62 Spanish-English healthy and neurologically bilingual speakers with a mean age of 19.94 (SD= 3.36). Thirty-seven participants completed the CNT in English first and then in Spanish (English-to-Spanish) and 25 participants completed the CNT in Spanish first and then in English (Spanish-to-English). The NASA-TLX was used to evaluate CNT perceived workloads. All the participants completed the NASA-TLX in English and Spanish after completing the CNT in the language given, respectfully. A series of paired-samples T-Tests were completed to evaluate groups CNT performance and perceived workload.Results:We found that the English-to-Spanish group performed better on the CNT in English first than completing it in Spanish second, p = .000. We also found that the English-to-Spanish group reported better performance and less mentally demanding on the CNT when it was completed in English first compared to completing it in Spanish second, p’s < .05. Regarding the Spanish-to-English group, we found participants performed worse when they completed the CNT in Spanish first compared to completing the CNT in English second, p = .000. Finally, the Spanish-to-English group reported worse performance completing the CNT in Spanish first, more temporal demanding, and more frustrating compared to completing the CNT in English second, p’s < .05.Conclusions:As expected, when participants completed the CNT in English, regardless of the order, they performed better and reported lower perceived workloads compared to completing the CNT in Spanish. Our data suggests that language order effect influenced participants CNT performance possibly due to not knowing specific items in Spanish compared to in English. Future studies using larger sample sizes should evaluate language order effects on the CNT in Spanish-English balanced bilingual speakers compared to unbalanced bilingual speakers.

Language contact phenomena in multiword units: The code-switching–calquing continuum

Aims and objectives:Code-switching and calquing are two widespread language contact phenomena in bilingual speech. While both phenomena have been discussed extensively in research on language contact in the past decades, only very few studies systematically investigate code-switching and calquing of and within multiword units or constructions. In our contribution, we aim at developing a more differentiated account of code-switching and calquing of and within multiword units and constructions, bringing together recent usage-based psycholinguistic and Construction Grammar theories and modeling with cognitively oriented approaches to language contact and bilingualism.Design:We analyze and discuss corpus data from the Corpus of Spanish in Southern Arizona (CESA) from first-, second-, and third-generation bilingual Spanish–English speakers in Arizona.Data and analysis:The corpus analysis focuses on code-switching and calquing of and within N Prep N, NN(N), and Adj N/N Adj patterns (N = noun, Prep = preposition, Adj = adjective).Findings/conclusions:The analysis highlights the importance of both lexically specific multiword units and partially and fully schematic constructions in code-switching and calquing as well as a continuum between constructions situated closer to the lexical or to the syntactic pole.Originality:Whereas multiword sequences have been found to play an important role in (mostly first language [L1]) acquisition, use, and processing, the role of multiword units and constructions in bilingual speech has been much less studied so far.Significance/implications:The study shows that both lexically specific constructions or multiword units as well as partially or fully schematic constructions play a central role in code-switching and calquing. The study argues that code-switching and calquing may ultimately be viewed as a continuum, since the speakers rely on similar, highly frequent, and productive constructions and their interlingual correspondences for both phenomena.

The Acquisition of the Spanish Trill (/R/) by Child Heritage Speakers: An Overview and Research Proposal

I propose an analysis on the acquisition of the alveolar trill /r/ by Spanish-speaking children as a heritage language. I aim to determine to what extent the acquisition of the trill by these speakers may differ from the same process in monolingual children. To that end, I will recruit twenty children Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers (3-6 years of age), and twenty monolingual children of the same age who have never been exposed to another language. To collect the data, I will schedule brief Zoom meetings with the parents of the participants, and I will ask them to connect with the children to play a quick game (a picture-naming task). I will carefully listen to the recordings and examine the participant’s accuracy to produce the acoustic features of the Spanish trill. I will analyze all the tokens acoustically using PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2017). The research hopes to be a contribution in the field of phonological acquisition of Spanish in bilingual settings, and to fill a gap in the literature regarding the development of the trill by heritage speakers.

Noun canonicity in heritage speakers and monolingual speakers of Spanish

The present investigation examines the role of Spanish noun gender-correlated endings when accessing gender agreement in two different linguistic populations: Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers and monolingual speakers of Spanish. This study analyzed data from 34 monolingual speakers of Spanish from the Dominican Republic and 44 heritage speakers of Spanish born in the United States who completed a picture naming task in Experiment 1 (determiner-noun agreement) and a picture description task in Experiment 2 (noun-adjective agreement). Results found that canonicity, particularly overt gender marking cues, seemed to have a facilitatory effect for monolingual speakers as seen by significantly faster naming times with transparent nouns on both experiments RTs analysis. However, within the heritage speaker group, no canonicity effects were found on either experiments RTs analyses indicating a difference between the monolingual and bilingual group. There was, however, an effect of noun canonicity in the accuracy rates of both experiments in the monolingual and bilingual group, specifically, a facilitatory effect of transparency, consonant with other studies with heritage speakers and/or monolingual speakers of Spanish (Hur, Lopez and Sanchez 2020; Montrul, Davidson, De La Fuente and Foote 2014; Montrul, De La Fuente, Davidson and Foote 2013; Alarcón 2011; Montrul, Foote and Perpiñán 2008). The main effects of canonicity and frequency found in Experiment 1 monolingual’s RTs analysis and the interaction between frequency and canonicity found in Experiment 2 strongly suggest that canonicity along with noun frequency (noun lexico-syntactic information) have a facilitatory effect in the gender agreement process. Therefore, these results corroborate the predictions of the Two-Route Hypothesis proposed by Gollan and Frost (2001) and psycholinguistic studies that have found a lexico-syntactic route and word-form route to gender access (Caffarra, Jansen and Barber 2014). Findings in the present study contribute to the understanding of different processing mechanisms in two adult populations and to our knowledge of the overall role of predictive nominal endings in gender agreement processes in both monolingual and heritage speakers of Spanish.

The Effect of Speech Perception in Noise on Arabic and Spanish Bilingual Listeners.

The purpose of this study was to compare speech perception performance in noise, as measured by signal-to-noise ratio for 50% correct scores (SNR-50) and SNR loss, between monolingual English speakers and two bilingual second-language learner populations with normal hearing sensitivity: Arabic-English and Spanish-English bilinguals. Additionally, this study observed how speech perception in noise varied as a function of language dominance for the Arabic-English bilinguals. This study was a quasi-experimental, nonrandomized study. Adults with normal peripheral hearing sensitivity participated in this study: Group 1 (n = 16) bilingual Arabic-English speakers who learned English as a second language; Group 2 (n = 10) bilingual Spanish-English speakers from a previous study; Group 3 (n = 27) monolingual English speakers combined from this study and the study of Mendel and Widner (2016). Speech perception was assessed using standardized methods for the Quick Speech-in-Noise (QuickSIN), the Bamford-Kowal-Bench Speech-in-Noise, the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT), and the Words-in-Noise tests. The two bilingual groups had significantly higher SNR-50 scores and greater SNR loss as compared to their monolingual peers. SNR-50 negatively correlated with language dominance for the QuickSIN and HINT for the Arabic-English speakers. Despite having normal hearing and being proficient in the English language, bilingual Arabic-English and Spanish-English speakers exhibited a mild SNR loss. Speech perception abilities were affected by test difficulty as well as the individual's degree of language dominance.

Changing pronoun interpretations across-languages: discourse priming in Spanish–English bilingual speakers

AbstractAre bilingual speakers’ representations of pronominal expressions completely independent in the two languages, or is there sharing of discourse-level representations cross-linguistically? In the present study, we address this question by using a sentence comprehension task that implements the cross-linguistic priming technique at the discourse-level.In two experiments conducted with Spanish–English bilinguals, we prime dis-preferred interpretations for ambiguous pronouns in the second language (English) by using first language (Spanish) pronoun interpretation primes. In experiment 1, Spanish null pronouns prime second-mentioned/object interpretations in English, showing an effect of priming. In experiment 2, Spanish explicit pronouns prime second-mentioned/object interpretations in English, indicating that an effect of priming approaches significance.The results demonstrate that bilinguals’ inferences about probability distributions and coherence relations are susceptible to cross-linguistic influence. The strength of the priming effect is discussed within models of cross-language abstract representations.

The Effect of Language Contact on /tʃ/ Deaffrication in Spanish from the US–Mexico Borderland

This study examines the sociophonetic variation in the L1 speech of Spanish–English bilingual speakers living in the Ciudad Juárez, Mexico–El Paso, TX border metropolis. The purpose of this research is to analyze the sociolinguistic production of /ʧ/ deaffrication in U.S. Spanish, particularly, in simultaneous and sequential bilinguals. Based on the Revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r), it was hypothesized that L1 production of /ʧ/ deaffrication can be significantly affected by the establishment of a new L2 phonetic category /ʃ/ in bilinguals. Interviews with forty-four adult participants, including fourteen first generation simultaneous bilinguals, twelve sequential bilinguals, and eighteen monolingual Spanish speakers were acoustically and auditorily analyzed. Participants were recorded while they performed two types of tasks: a formal (reading) and two semi-informal speech production tasks. Results showed that simultaneous and sequential bilinguals had a significantly lower realization of [ʃ] than monolinguals, suggesting that L1 sociolinguistic variability is influenced by contact with English. Results also indicate the significance of the preceding segment on the realization of the variable under study in monolingual speech, with preceding /a, n, r, l/ favoring the variation and preceding /s, e, i, o, u/ disfavoring it. Comparisons of the variation in monolingual and bilingual speech show that the sociolinguistic factors (preceding segment, sex, and age) that influence the variation in monolingual controls do not influence the variation in bilingual speech.

Automatic sound encoding is sensitive to language familiarity: Evidence from English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals

We investigated whether language familiarity has a modulatory effect on automatic sound encoding in the auditory brainstem by measuring frequency-following responses (FFRs) to repeating speech syllables that played in the background while monolingual English speakers and Spanish-English bilingual speakers watched cartoon videos in English and Spanish. For the English monolinguals, we found that the FFR signal quality was different between the two language conditions, with higher signal to noise ratios emerging for the Spanish compared to the English condition. For the Spanish-English bilinguals, the FFR signal quality was overall higher than the monolinguals, but there no effect of language condition on the FFR. Thus, both language familiarity of the environment and bilingual language experience, may modulate automatic sound encoding.

Bilingualism and Voice Production. Differences Between Bilingual Latin-American Spanish- English Female Speakers and Monolingual Spanish Female Speakers During Spanish Productions

BackgroundSpeaking a second language influences jitter and shimmer when comparing monolingual English speakers with bilingual English-Spanish speakers. However, there is little information about differences on voice acoustic parameters when comparing monolingual Spanish speakers with bilingual Spanish-English speakers during their productions in Spanish. AimDetermine differences in five voice acoustic parameters commonly used in voice assessments (fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, Harmonics-to-Noise Ratio and Cepstral Peak Prominence Smoothed) which may be influenced by bilingualism. MethodsExploratory cross-sectional study with two groups of female participants: monolingual Spanish speakers (n = 17), and bilingual Spanish-English speakers (n = 11). Participants filled out a questionnaire and recorded two voice samples (sustained vowel /a/ and reading). For this study, all the participants reported that their native language was Spanish. ResultsBeing a female bilingual speaker had a significant effect on Shimmer (%) with a Beta = -0.7. Similar tendency was found on harmonics-to-noise ratio (B = 0.2) and cepstral peak prominence smoothed (B = 0.2). ConclusionsOur results indicate that being a native Spanish female speaker, speaking English as a second language, has significant small effects on voice acoustic parameters, such as shimmer, harmonics-to-noise ratio and cepstral peak prominence smoothed, during their productions in Spanish. This information is of interest for assessment and intervention plans of bilingual speakers at clinical and work-related settings.

Perspective-Taking With Deictic Motion Verbs in Spanish: What We Learn About Semantics and the Lexicon From Heritage Child Speakers and Adults.

In English, deictic verbs of motion, such as come can encode the perspective of the speaker, or another individual, such as the addressee or a narrative protagonist, at a salient reference time and location, in the form of an indexical presupposition. By contrast, Spanish has been claimed to have stricter requirements on licensing conditions for venir (“to come”), only allowing speaker perspective. An open question is how a bilingual learner acquiring both English and Spanish reconciles these diverging language-specific restrictions. We face this question head on by investigating narrative productions of young Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers of Spanish, in comparison to English monolingual and Spanish dominant adults and children. We find that the young heritage speakers produce venir in linguistic contexts where most Spanish adult speakers do not, but where English monolingual speakers do, and also resemble those of young monolingual Spanish speakers of at least one other Spanish dialect, leading us to generate two mutually-exclusive hypotheses: (a) the encoding of speaker perspective in the young heritage children is cross-linguistically influenced by the more flexible and dominant language (English), resulting in a wider range of productions by these malleable young speakers than the Spanish grammar actually allows, or (b) the young Spanish speakers are exhibiting productions that are in fact licensed in the grammar, but which are pruned away in the adult productions, being supplanted by other forms as the lexicon is enriched. Given independent evidence of the heritage speakers' robust Spanish linguistic competence, we turn to systematically-collected acceptability judgments of three dialectal varieties of monolingual adult Spanish speakers of the distribution of perspective-taking verbs, to assess their competence and adjudicate between (a) and (b). We find that adults accept venir in contexts in which they do not produce it, leading us to argue that (a) venir is not obligatorily speaker-oriented in Spanish, as has been claimed, (b) adults may not produce venir in these contexts because they instead select more specific motion verbs, and (c) for heritage bilingual children, the more dominant language (English) may support the grammatically licensed but lexically-constrained productions in Spanish.

Influence of raciolinguistic expectations on phoneme discrimination in Spanish-English bilinguals

Work has demonstrated that social expectations about a speaker's identity can affect how their speech is perceived (e.g., D'Onofrio, 2019) and that interactional context, which is hypothesized to include non-linguistic cues like face or voice, may influence bilingual language processing (e.g., Grosjean, 2001). We unite these bodies of work to investigate how social information may be utilized in bilingual speech perception. In the United States, researchers have documented raciolinguistic ideologies around the use of Spanish, including that it is an indicator of Latinx identity (Rosa, 2016). To test whether racialized ideologies triggered language-specific processing strategies, thirty-one early or simultaneous Spanish-English bilingual speakers from the United States completed a visually primed phoneme discrimination task, categorizing bilabial stop continua (from /ba/ to /pa/). This design followed work demonstrating that Spanish-English bilinguals shifted their /b-p/ identification boundary as a function of the language they were told they'd be hearing (Gonzales et al., 2019). While raciolinguistic evaluations appeared to influence bilingual speech perception, they did not work the same way for each voice, suggesting the integration of multiple cues (both acoustic and social) in perception, and that the influence of raciolinguistic ideologies on speech perception may be contingent on complex aspects of the perceived speaker.

Verbal fluency in three Spanish-English bilingual speakers with TBI

This study investigated differences between healthy bilingual participants and bilingual participants with traumatic brain injury (TBI) on verbal fluency tasks. The performance of three Spanish-English bilingual speakers with traumatic brain injury was compared to the performance of 30 neurotypical bilingual speakers on tasks of category and letter verbal fluency in English and Spanish. Responses were analyzed for total number of correct productions, differences in correct productions between languages, average cluster size, total number of switches, and rates of language choice errors. The data were analyzed using predicted scores from regression equations based on neurotypical data and modified t-tests. Analyses revealed significantly lower total output than predicted by the regression equations for both task types and in both languages for one TBI participant. The same participant demonstrated significantly lower total number of switches than the neurotypical group. Two participants demonstrated higher rates of language choice errors than the neurotypical group. There were no significant differences between TBI participants and the neurotypical group for average cluster size. There were no significant differences between predicted and obtained values for differences between English and Spanish total number correct in each task type. Results are discussed in the context of individual cognitive and linguistic profiles of the TBI participants.

Do Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers Differ in Language Processing? Evidence from Behavior and ERPs

The present study was designed to empirically examine the effects of bilingualism on language processing. Participants consisted of 20 English monolingual and 20 Spanish-English bilingual speakers. All participants were required to complete an English language processing task consisting of categorically related versus unrelated word pairs, and behavioral and electrophysiological data were recorded and analyzed. Overall, results yielded a congruency effect indicating that participants were more accurate in identifying incongruent word pairs than congruent word pairs. There were significant interactions between congruency and bilingualism on behavioral and electrophysiological variables, and monolingual participants outperformed their bilingual counterparts on accuracy and reaction time measures. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Proactive and Reactive Language Control in the Bilingual Brain.

The current experiment investigated bilingual language control within the dual mechanisms framework. In an fMRI investigation of morphosyntactic rule production, the presence or absence of target language cues was manipulated to investigate the neural mechanisms associated with proactive and reactive global language control mechanisms. Patterns of activation across nine regions of interest (ROIs) were investigated in seventeen early Spanish–English bilingual speakers. A cue by phase interaction in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and pre-supplementary motor area (Pre-SMA) was observed, suggesting that these regions were more active during cue phases, and less active during execution phases, when target language cues were presented. Individual differences analyses showed that variability in proactive control (informative > non-informative cued trial activation during preparation) in the basal ganglia was correlated with proactive control in the left DLPFC, left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and right precentral ROIs. In contrast, reactive control (non-informative > informative cued activation during execution) in the anterior cingulate was correlated with reactive control in the Pre-SMA and left orbital frontal ROIs. The results suggest that, consistent with the dual mechanisms framework, bilinguals differ in the degree to which they use cues to proactively prepare to use a target language.

Polysyllabic shortening in Spanish-English bilingual children

Aims and objectives:Polysyllabic shortening is thought to contribute to the perception of stress-timed rhythm in some languages. Little is known about its use in the speech of children exposed to a language that incorporates it more frequently (e.g. English) and one that incorporates it less frequently (e.g. Spanish). The purpose of the current investigation was to explore polysyllabic shortening in bilingual children’s two languages compared to monolingual Spanish and English comparison groups.Method/Design:We performed a group-level, cross-sectional study comparing the magnitude of polysyllabic shortening for monolingual English- and Spanish-speaking children and Spanish-English bilingual children.Data/Analysis:Sixteen monolingual English speakers, 23 monolingual Spanish speakers, and 16 Spanish-English bilingual speakers produced two- and four-syllable words in English only, Spanish only, or both English and Spanish, respectively. Ages ranged from 4;5 to 7;7 ( M = 5;10, SD = 7 months). English and Spanish words had the same syllable shapes and primary stress locations. Articulation rate was measured by syllables per second. A language history questionnaire and standardized vocabulary test were also administered. Comparisons were made both between and within groups.Results:Both monolingual English and Spanish speakers utilized polysyllabic shortening to similar degrees. Bilingual children produced polysyllabic shortening in English and Spanish to the same degree as their monolingual peers, but they produced it to a greater degree in their own Spanish than in their own English.Conclusion:Polysyllabic shortening might be a universal feature of speech that results from universal phonetic constraints. For the bilingual children, greater use of polysyllabic shortening in Spanish than English may be related to better Spanish than English articulatory control.

Nasometric Comparison Between Spanish-English Bilingual and English Monolingual Children.

It is well established in the literature that English diagnostic tests should not be directly applied to speakers whose primary language is Spanish. Normative nasalance data across word and sentence-level stimuli among Spanish-English bilingual children living in the United States have not been provided. The present study aims to (1) compare differences in nasalance between typically developing Spanish-English bilingual children and English-speaking monolingual children and (2) determine whether within-speaker nasalance differences exist in Spanish-English bilingual children when presented with English and Spanish speech stimuli. Thirty-four typically developing children including 17 monolingual English speakers and 17 Spanish-English bilingual speakers with normal velopharyngeal anatomy between 5 and 7 years of age participated in the study. Speakers were recorded using a nasometer producing sets of stimulus items at the word and sentence level in English (English monolinguals) and in both Spanish and English for bilingual children. Results indicated no statistically significant difference between nasalance values across the different stimuli between monolingual and bilingual participants. However, within-subject effects showed statistical significance between English and Spanish word stimuli among the bilingual group. These findings emphasize the importance of using language-specific diagnostic materials for nasalance testing, which would be of importance in the treatment of individuals with cleft palate.

Diagnostic Accuracy of Traditional Measures of Phonological Ability for Bilingual Preschoolers and Kindergarteners.

Bilingual children whose phonological skills are evaluated using measures designed for monolingual English speakers are at risk for misdiagnosis of speech sound disorders (De Lamo White & Jin, 2011). Forty-four children participated in this study: 15 typically developing monolingual English speakers, 7 monolingual English speakers with phonological disorders, 14 typically developing bilingual Spanish-English speakers, and 8 bilingual children with phonological disorders. Children's single-word speech productions were examined on Percentage Consonants Correct-Revised (Shriberg, Austin, Lewis, McSweeny, & Wilson, 1997a) and accuracy of early-, middle-, and late-developing sounds (Shriberg, 1993) in English. Consonant accuracy in English was compared between monolinguals and bilinguals with and without speech sound disorders. Logistic regression and receiver operating characteristic curves were used to observe diagnostic accuracy of the measures examined. Percentage Consonants Correct-Revised was found to be a good indicator of phonological ability in both monolingual and bilingual English-speaking children at the age of 5;0. No significant differences were found between language groups on any of the measures examined. Our results suggest that traditional measures of phonological ability for monolinguals could provide good diagnostic accuracy for bilingual children at the age of 5;0 years. These findings are preliminary, and children younger than 5;0 years should be examined for risk of misdiagnosis.

Language Skills of Bidialectal and Bilingual Children

This article examines the language and cognitive skills of bidialectal and bilingual children, focusing on African American English bidialectal speakers and Spanish-English bilingual speakers. It contributes to the discussion by considering two themes in the extant literature: (1) linguistic and cognitive strengths can be found in speaking two languages or dialects, and (2) advantages accrue when considering the groups together (or at least side-by-side) rather than separately. A strengths-based framework is proposed, whereby the goal is to identify the linguistic and cognitive strengths of these two groups that might support assessment, intervention, and culturally appropriate characterization of key language and cognitive skills. Morphosyntax, complex syntax, and narrative discourse are explored for both groups. In addition, executive function and code-switching are discussed because they relate to language and cognitive development of both bidialectal and bilingual speakers. Although some differences between the two groups are obvious, the possible similarities or intersection between the two language groups is potentially informative and may provide direction for researchers and clinicians alike.

Spanglish: The Hybrid Voice of Latinos in the United States

The language practices of Latinos in the US continue to attract attention from politicians, educators, journalists, linguists and the general Hispanic and non-Hispanic public. While monolingual speakers of English in the US expect Hispanics to shift to English like other minority language speakers have done in the past, monolingual speakers of Spanish expect them to speak “pure” Spanish. Even Spanish-English bilingual speakers criticize Latinos for mixing Spanish and English or speaking Spanglish. This term has been rejected by some linguists who claim that it is technically flawed and only applies to casual oral registers. In this paper I consider the linguistic nature, sociolinguistic functions and attitudes towards Spanglish, I show that Latinos are using this hybrid, heteroglossic variety beyond casual oral registers, and I suggest a broader perspective which not only considers the linguistic features of Spanglish but also the political, social and cultural issues involved. Keywords: Spanglish; code-switching; Latinos; US Spanish; code-mixing; mixed language