Gender Assignment to Spanish Pseudowords by Monolingual and Basque-Spanish Bilingual Children

This study examines gender marking in the Spanish of Basque-Spanish bilingual children. We analyze data collected via a production task designed to elicit 48 DPs, controlling for gender of referents and for number and types of morphological cues to grammatical gender. The goals were to determine the extent to which participants rely on biological cues (female referent =\u3eFEM gender, male referent =\u3eMASC gender) and morpho-phonological cues (-a ending =\u3eFEM, -o ending =\u3eMASC, others =\u3eMASC or FEM) to assign gender to pseudowords/novel words; and whether bilinguals’ language dominance (Spanish strong/weak) has an effect. Data were collected from 49 5- to 6-year-old Spanish-speaking children—28 monolingual L1 Spanish (L1Sp) and 21 Basque-dominant (L1 Basque-L2 Spanish) bilinguals (BDB). Results reveal a general preference for MASC gender across conditions, especially in BDB children, who produced masculine modifiers for 83% of items, while the L1Sp children did so for only 63% of items. Regression analyses show that for both groups, morphological cues have more weight than the nature of the referent in participants’ assignment of gender to novel words, and that the L1Sp group is more attentive to FEM morphological markers than the BDB group, pointing towards the existence of differences in the strength of cue-patterns for gender marking

Testing alternative theoretical accounts of code-switching:Insights from comparative judgments of adjective-noun order

Objectives:Spanish and English contrast in adjective–noun word order: for example, brown dress (English) vs. vestido marrón (‘dress brown’, Spanish). According to the Matrix Language model ( MLF) word order in code-switched sentences must be compatible with the word order of the matrix language, but working within the minimalist program (MP), Cantone and MacSwan arrived at the descriptive generalization that the position of the noun phrase relative to the adjective is determined by the adjective’s language. Our aim is to evaluate the predictions derived from these two models regarding adjective–noun order in Spanish–English code-switched sentences.Methodology:We contrasted the predictions from both models regarding the acceptability of code-switched sentences with different adjective–noun orders that were compatible with the MP, the MLF, both, or none. Acceptability was assessed in Experiment 1 with a 5-point Likert and in Experiment 2 with a 2-Alternative Forced Choice (2AFC) task.Data and analysis:Data from both experiments were subjected to linear mixed model analyses. Results from the 2AFC task were also analyzed using Thurstone’s law of comparative judgment.Conclusions:We found an additive effect in which both the language of the verb and the language of the adjective determine word order.Originality:Both experiments examine adjective–noun word order in English–Spanish code-switched sentences. Experiment 2 represents a novel application of Thurstone’s law of comparative judgements to the study of linguistic acceptability which yielded clearer results than Likert scales. We found convincing evidence that neither the MLF nor the MP can fully account for the acceptability of adjective–noun switches.Implications:We suggest that advances in our understanding of grammaticality in code-switching will be achieved by combining the insights of the two frameworks instead of considering them in isolation, or by espousing a probabilistic model of code-switching.</jats:sec

Eye Tracking Investigation Into Semantic Convergence In Fully Fluent Spanish-English Bilingual Adults

Aims and Objectives: This article examines semantic convergence of bilinguals’ two languages in the case of words that overlap semantically but are not fully isomorphic in meaning and application. To what extent do the type of bilingual, type of category, and relative semantic width across the languages matter? Design: The primary method involves eye tracking while participants chose pictures corresponding to an English word heard. The data examine potential differences in simultaneous Spanish–English bilinguals’, early Spanish L1–English L2 bilinguals’, and monolingual English speakers’ durations and numbers of fixations on potential candidates for referents. Data and Analysis: Thirty-eight participants were administered the task in relation to 48 English words from three types of words (classical, radial, and homophonic), half with wider semantic extension in English, half with wider semantic extension in Spanish. Durations and numbers of fixations were analyzed with ANOVAs with participant group, word type, and semantic width treated as variables. Findings/Conclusions: Data revealed minimal influences from Spanish on English with homophonic words, but for classical categories, and to some extent radial categories, bilinguals showed influence from Spanish on English words: participants considered referents that would be relevant for Spanish but not English. Originality: Eye tracking provides a window into the online processing of words and their referents, and thus provides more subtle clues to bilinguals’ processing of these categories relative to monolinguals’. The results support a special status relative to semantic convergence for words whose referents correspond to categories whose members lie close together in the conceptual space. Significance/Implications: For us to best account for semantic convergence in bilingual speakers, these data indicate that the type of category and the category structure in the conceptual space matter, the relative widths of the categories in bilinguals’ two languages matter, the task demands matter, and the type of bilingual matters

On the Grammaticality of Passivization In Bilingual Compound Verbs

Objectives/Research Questions: We examined stative and eventive passive bilingual compound verbs (BCVs) in Spanish/English code-switching. Of particular interest to us was the availability of passivization in bilingual eventive passive hacer “do” constructions, purportedly banned in bilingual speech due to a universal syntactic restriction. Methodology: A total of 119 bilinguals from Northern Belize and 36 from Southwest United States completed a two-alternative forced-choice acceptability task and a language background questionnaire. Data and Analysis: The analysis was conducted using Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgment. Conclusion: For stative passive BCVs, results revealed that Spanish/English bilinguals from both contexts gave the highest ratings to code-switched constructions without the light verb hacer. For eventive passive BCVs, however, Belize bilinguals gave preferential ratings to passive constructions with the light verb hacer. Conversely, US bilinguals rejected them. Notably, among Belize bilinguals, eventive passive BCVs that were rated as most acceptable were constructions with no gender agreement between the light verb and the feminine antecedent noun. Originality: This is the first cross-community analysis that investigates stative and eventive passive BCVs in Spanish/English code-switching. Implications: Our findings show that the light verb hacer is compatible with both stative and eventive passive BCVs. Crucially, context-specific linguistic norms and social factors rather than a universal syntactic restriction primarily determine the availability of passivization in eventive passive BCVs. Our theorizing of code-switching grammars, thus, necessitates careful consideration of invariant and variable production patterns that are profoundly shaped by historical and sociolinguistic conditions

Bilingual Verbs In Three Spanish/English Code-Switching Communities

Objectives/Research Questions: We investigate two understudied bilingual compound verbs that have been attested in Spanish/English code-switching; namely, ‘hacer + VInf’ and ‘estar + VProg’. Specifically, we examined speakers’ intuitions vis-à-vis the acceptability and preferential use of non-canonical and canonical hacer ‘to do’ or estar ‘to be’ bilingual constructions among bilinguals from Northern Belize, New Mexico and Puerto Rico. Methodology: Speakers from Northern Belize (n = 44), New Mexico (n = 32) and Puerto Rico (n = 30) completed a two-alternative forced-choice acceptability task and a language background questionnaire. Data and Analysis: The data were examined using an analysis of variance and Thurstone’s Law of Comparative Judgment. Conclusions: Whereas Northern Belizean bilinguals gave the highest ratings to ‘hacer + VInf’, both groups of US bilinguals gave preferential ratings to ‘estar + VProg’ bilingual constructions. On the other hand, Puerto Rican bilinguals gave the highest preferential ratings to the canonical estar bilingual compound verbs (i.e. estar + an English progressive verb) but rejected hacer bilingual compound verbs. While ‘hacer + VInf’ and ‘estar + VProg’ may represent variants that are available to Spanish/English bilinguals, the present findings suggest a community-specific distribution, in which hacer bilingual compound verbs are consistently preferred over estar bilingual compound verbs in Northern Belize, whereas estar bilingual constructions are preferred among US bilinguals. Originality:This is the first cross-community examination of these bilingual compound verbs in Northern Belize (Central America/Caribbean), New Mexico (Southwest US) and Puerto Rico (US/Caribbean), three contexts in the Spanish-speaking world characterized by long-standing Spanish/English language contact and the use of bilingual language practices. Implications:Findings underscore the importance of bilingual language experience in modulating linguistic competence and the necessity to study code-switching from a language ecological perspective, as subtle context-specific patterns in code-switching varieties may be manifested not only in bilingual speakers’ oral production but in intuition as well. A more fine-grained understanding of speakers’ judgments is vital to experimental studies that seek to investigate code-switching grammars both within and across communities where code-switching varieties of the same language pair are spoken

Using Two-Alternative Forced Choice Tasks and Thurstone\u27s Law of Comparative Judgments for Code-Switching Research

This article argues that 2-alternative forced choice tasks and Thurstone\u27s law of comparative judgments (Thurstone, 1927) are well suited to investigate codeswitching competence by means of acceptability judgments. We compare this method with commonly used Likert scale judgments and find that the 2-alternative forced choice task provides granular details that remain invisible in a Likert scale experiment. In order to compare and contrast both methods, we examined the syntactic phenomenon usually referred to as the Adjacency Condition (AC) (apud Stowell, 1981), which imposes a condition of adjacency between verb and object. Our interest in the AC comes from the fact that it is a subtle feature of English grammar which is absent in Spanish, and this provides an excellent springboard to create minimal code-switched pairs that allow us to formulate a clear research question that can be tested using both methods

Gender Assignment to Spanish Pseudowords by Monolingual and Basque-Spanish Bilingual Children

This study examines gender marking in the Spanish of Basque-Spanish bilingual children. We analyze data collected via a production task designed to elicit 48 DPs, controlling for gender of referents and for number and types of morphological cues to grammatical gender. The goals were to determine the extent to which participants rely on biological cues (female referent =&gt;FEM gender, male referent =&gt;MASC gender) and morpho-phonological cues (-a ending =&gt;FEM, -o ending =&gt;MASC, others =&gt;MASC or FEM) to assign gender to pseudowords/novel words; and whether bilinguals&rsquo; language dominance (Spanish strong/weak) has an effect. Data were collected from 49 5- to 6-year-old Spanish-speaking children&mdash;28 monolingual L1 Spanish (L1Sp) and 21 Basque-dominant (L1 Basque-L2 Spanish) bilinguals (BDB). Results reveal a general preference for MASC gender across conditions, especially in BDB children, who produced masculine modifiers for 83% of items, while the L1Sp children did so for only 63% of items. Regression analyses show that for both groups, morphological cues have more weight than the nature of the referent in participants&rsquo; assignment of gender to novel words, and that the L1Sp group is more attentive to FEM morphological markers than the BDB group, pointing towards the existence of differences in the strength of cue-patterns for gender marking

Norms From 10,491 Spanish Words

The discrete emotion theory proposes that affective experiences can be reduced to a limited set of universal “basic” emotions, most commonly identified as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. Here we present norms for 10,491 Spanish words for those five discrete emotions collected from a total of 2,010 native speakers, making it the largest set of norms for discrete emotions in any language to date. When used in conjunction with the norms from Hinojosa, Martínez-García et al. (Behavior Research Methods, 48, 272–284, 2016) and Ferré, Guasch, Martínez-García, Fraga, & Hinojosa (Behavior Research Methods, 49, 1082-1094, 2017), researchers now have access to ratings of discrete emotions for 13,633 Spanish words. Our norms show a high degree of inter-rater reliability and correlate highly with those from Ferré et al. (2017). Our exploration of the relationship between the five discrete emotions and relevant lexical and emotional variables confirmed findings of previous studies conducted with smaller datasets. The availability of such large set of norms will greatly facilitate the study of emotion, language and related fields. The norms are available as supplementary materials to this article

Age/order of acquisition effects and the cumulative learning of foreign words: A word training study

Early acquired words are processed faster than later acquired words in lexical and semantictasks. Demonstrating such age of acquisition (AoA) effects beyond reasonable doubt, andthen investigating those effects empirically, is complicated by the natural correlationbetween AoA and other word properties such as frequency and imageability. In an effortto find a laboratory analog of AoA effects which would allow such issues to be addressedmore easily, we conducted three experiments in which participants learned foreign words,with some (‘early’) words trained from the outset while other (‘late’) words were introducedsome time later then interleaved with the early words. Order of acquisition effectswere observed in picture naming, lexical decision and semantic categorization, persistingfor several weeks after the end of training. The results demonstrate an important role fororder of acquisition in the formation of lexical representations that is independent of otherfactors such as cumulative frequency, frequency trajectory and imageability. Analyses ofcumulative learning effects offer the potential to investigate the differential impact of earlyand later experiences on the formation of lexical and other mental representations. Thediscovery of order of acquisition effects in word learning also has implications for classroomteaching of second language vocabulary

Semantic and conceptual factors in Spanish–English bilinguals’ processing of lexical categories in their two languages

This study examines possible semantic interaction in fully fluent adult simultaneous and early second language (L2) bilinguals. Monolingual and bilingual speakers of Spanish and English (n = 144) were tested for their understanding of lexical categories that differed in their two languages. Simultaneous bilinguals came from homes in which Spanish or Spanish and English were spoken when they were children, and L2 bilinguals entered the US as children. Accuracy data show higher ultimate attainment of language-specific semantic knowledge in English than in Spanish, but in both languages the interaction of the semantic categories with conceptual knowledge is observable. The data reveal subtle differences in early bilinguals\u27 extensions of words, but only in some types of categories, and modified by level of proficiency