Fall 2022 talks, organized by Professor Erik Willis  

September 30, 2022  

Speakers: Madison Wray (Ph.D. candidate), Mackenzie Coulter-Kern (Ph.D. candidate), and Laura Gurzynski-Weiss (Professor)  

“Evaluating the effectiveness of primary-level tasks: Triangulating teacher, researcher, and student perspectives.”  

Abstract:  

Evaluating if tasks perform as designed is a question of critical importance in a task-based program. However, this important step is often overlooked and/or considered separately from implementation. This study details our triangulated and integrated approach to examining the effectiveness of a year-long task-based Spanish program we designed for a primary school for the 2021-2022 academic year. In this program, learners at each grade level have weekly 40-minute Spanish classes together regardless of prior language experience, which ranged from completely novice to fluent. Specifically, in this study we evaluate task effectiveness via teacher post-task surveys and weekly interviews, researcher interpretations of student task data (communicative and linguistic outcomes), and student enjoyment ratings provided at the end of each of the 4 tasks in the initial unit.  Results will be contextualized within the larger task-based program cycle (needs analysis, task-based design, implementation, evaluation, redesign, etc.; Long, 2005, Serafini, Long, & Lake, 2015) and the larger rural community, which is 70% English-speaking and 30% Spanish-speaking. We will describe how we created this program collaboratively with community stakeholders including administrators, teachers, parents, and the local Latinx outreach coordinator, as well as how we engaged weekly with both the teacher and the task-based data. Finally, we will detail how we used this evaluation to inform and adjust the design of the second year of the program that begins in August of 2022. Contributing to larger conversations about the importance of practitioner-based research (Sato & Loewen, 2022), we will also stress the value and importance of approaching task-based data through the lens of all principal stakeholders— in our case, the teacher, students, and researchers— and how each lens offers unique insight on how to maximize learning opportunities, echoing results from prior task-based work comparing perspectives (e.g., Tavakoli, 2009, Révész & Gurzynski-Weiss, 2016).  

October 21, 2022   

Speakers: Leslie Del Carpio (Assistant Professor) and Rosti Vana (Assistant Professor, Sam Houston State University)  

“It’s an oye mami, oye papi type of Spanish: Heritage learners’ attitudes toward an aspiring US Spanish study away program”  

Abstract:  

Scholars have steadily called for a deforeignization of the Spanish language and its community of speakers in the US, particularly focusing on changing the way Spanish in the US is perceived (Pascual y Cabo & Prada, 2018; Tecedor & Pascual y Cabo, 2019). This task has been started by curriculum changes and the implementation of a Critical Language Awareness (CLA) framework, which views Spanish as a local language rather than a foreign language (Leeman, 2018; Pascual y Cabo & Prada, 2018). As the COVID-19 pandemic ceased the potential for study abroad, study away programs in Spanish speaking communities within the US have become more reasonable and plausible, especially for Spanish Heritage Language Learners (HLLs), who potentially acquired their Spanish in such a community. The purpose of this presentation is to present HLLs’ attitudes toward the possibility of study away programs in the US as alternatives to study abroad. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews of 12 HLLs enrolled in an advanced mixed course at a large university in the US Southwest. The findings indicate that all HLLs would rather not take part in a study abroad program in the US because they believed that learning Spanish there would entail learning “Spanglish,” which would, in their opinion, make it difficult to become “fluent” and even stigmatize them. Some participants also stated that they had no intrinsic or extrinsic motivation for the program and displayed standard language ideologies by claiming that US Spanish is “relaxed” and not “formal” and believed that studying Spanish in the US would not help them acquire “formality nor would it be worthwhile.” On the other hand, most of the participants also stated that they did not have a need to study away as they speak and hear Spanish in their communities and are able to communicate effectively, but would rather study abroad, mentioning Spain as the top choice for Spanish study. As the results demonstrate, there is an understanding among participants that studying Spanish in the US does not afford complex and formal acquisition of the language, but rather equates to being stigmatized and learning ‘Spanglish.’ For this reason, we present pedagogical implications and demonstrate the need for continuous incorporation of Spanish in the US in all Spanish language learning contexts.  

October 28, 2023   

Special session: Preparation for Hispanic Linguistics Symposium  

Speaker: Estefany Sosa (Ph.D. student)  

“No ando dinero: The case of the verb andar in verb+noun constructions in Central American Spanish.” 

Abstract:  

The development of motion verbs into copula and auxiliary verbs is well documented in the literature of grammaticalization and semantic change (Bybee et al. 1994, Traugott 1995, Traugott & Dasher 2002). In contemporary Spanish, the verb andar, originally only an intransitive verb of motion, also functions as a copula verb and as an auxiliary verb. As is typical of copula verbs in the Romance languages, andar is often combined with a predicate with adjectival properties (Laca 2000) or as a stative verb with prepositional phrases (e.g., andamos tristes, anda con frío), and as an auxiliary verb in complex predicates with nonfinite verbs (e.g., anda cantando). In most varieties of Spanish, the verb andar follows the pattern outlined above; nonetheless, in Central American varieties of Spanish, the verb andar has expanded its role to verb+noun constructions. The aim of the present study is to analyze this expanded usage of the verb andar in Central American Spanish, exemplified in (1)-(3). Specifically, this study aims to provide a description of the usage patterns of the verb andar in verb+noun constructions in Central American Spanish, while also considering its relationship to other copula and auxiliary verbs in Spanish. In this pilot study, Twitter data from the Central American territories were used. Three hundred twenty-eight tokens were coded for polarity, person/number, time/aspect, mood and the presence of articles in the noun phrase. Because the verbs andar and tener are used with roughly equivalent meanings and in similar contexts in Central American Spanish, the semantic differences between these verbs were also analyzed. To do so, andar+noun and tener+noun constructions were coded and categorized based on the type of state or possession to determine the semantic differences between each verb.  The preliminary analysis of the data indicates that the use of andar+noun constructions is not limited to describing possessions that can be carried on the body, and that speakers use these constructions to describe a large range of states and possession types. Furthermore, andar+noun constructions are employed with articles in the present indicative to describe states and possessions that hold and are relevant at the time of utterance. On the contrary, tener+noun constructions are used to describe abstract concepts and states/possessions that hold at a larger time interval. A major contribution of this study is to add to the virtually non-existent body of literature of Central American Spanish morphosyntax and semantics, as well as to the general knowledge of copula and auxiliary verbs in the Spanish language. 

Speakers: Nicholas Blaker (Ph.D. candidate) and Tom Goebel-Mahrle (Ph.D. candidate)  

“Revisiting the acquisition of the variable perfective past in L2 Spanish in a study abroad context.”

Abstract:  

Although present perfects are prototypically used to encode past events that are relevant or ongoing at speech time (Comrie, 1976), the Spanish Present Perfect (PP) is grammaticalizing into a perfective past marker (Schwenter, 1994) in a process known as aoristic drift (Squartini & Bertinetto, 2000). This process is most advanced in Peninsular varieties, where the PP has come to supplant the Preterite in hodiernal (i.e., same day) contexts (Schwenter & Torres Cacoullos, 2008), and in association with telic predicates (Geeslin et al., 2013). Past studies on the L2 acquisition of the perfective PP have allowed learners to choose between Preterite and PP forms in contextualized preference tasks. These investigations suggest that learners are capable of acquiring native-like constraints on the use of the hodiernal PP after periods of study abroad in Spain (e.g., Geeslin et al., 2012; Geeslin et al., 2013). The current study continues this line of research by asking if learners are capable of producing PP forms via a contextualized verb elicitation task in which they are not provided with the PP as a possible response choice. Additionally, the current investigation includes items with hesternal and pre-hesternal temporal reference to determine if the use of the PP is expanding in these contexts among Native Speakers (NSs), as is commonly assumed in situations of aoristic drift (Squartini & Bertinetto, 2000). A total of 23 English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish at the intermediate level living and studying in León, Spain during a 6 week immersion program and 24 NSs from the same region completed a contextualized verb elicitation task (Gudmestad, 2012). Participants were presented with a written contextualized story in Spanish, leading them to a cloze-style conversational exchange that prompted them to fill in their preferred verbal form. The contextualized verb elicitation task investigated the interaction of the following linguistic variables: temporal reference (i.e. hodiernal, hesternal and pre-hesternal) and telicity (i.e. atelic and telic), which resulted in a total of 12-items for examination. In addition, all participants completed a background questionnaire and the L2 participants completed a proficiency task (Woosley, 2006). Results of the contextualized verb elicitation task demonstrate that NSs prefer the Preterite over the PP in this variety, however use of the PP is favored in hodiernal contexts. At Time 1 the learners used a range of tense forms, but the Preterite was the preferred form followed by the Imperfect and Present. At Time 2 the learners use of the Present decreased with an increase in usage of the Preterite and the Imperfect. Although the PP was employed among the NSs, the learners in the present study did not employ the PP at Time 2., Our results suggest that while  these learners make adjustments to their interlanguage, we do not observe a shift towards an effect for temporal reference with the PP in hodiernal contexts as observed in previous investigations  (Geeslin et al. 2012; 2013).

Speakers: Katie Jonard (Ph.D. student), Estefany Sosa (Ph.D. student), and Erik Willis (Associate Professor)  

“Variable trill production: A variationist analysis of pre-breathiness in Dominican Spanish”

Abstract:  

The Spanish trill /r/ has often been categorized as having two or more occlusions, though this is variable, as many trills have less than two occlusions. Some studies have suggested this is a neutralization process (Hammond, 1999), but other studies show clear signs of contrast maintenance between the two sounds (Colantoni, 2006; Diaz-Campos, 2008; Melero-García & Cisneros, 2020; Willis & Bradley, 2008). In their study on rhotic production in Dominican Spanish, Willis & Bradley (2008) found that Dominicans favor pre-breathy voice before one occlusion [ɦɾ] to mark a trill, though other productions such as [ɦr], [ɦ], and [r] are present in native speech. While these four variations have been documented in Dominican Spanish, there is no sociolinguistic data on the distribution of these realizations.  The present study seeks to explore the sociolinguistic distribution of the four variants found in Willis & Bradley (2008) by analyzing 840 tokens from a corpus of 42 Dominican speakers from the Cibao region. The speakers completed a picture elicitation task using images as a source to not only invoke emotions, but also natural and spontaneous speech (Melero-Garcia, 2020). For each speaker, the first 20 tokens of a trill were extracted from their productions and coded according to which of the four variants were produced. The segments were coded according to presence of pre-breathiness, voicing, number of occlusions, phrase-position, and stress using PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2022). The speakers were balanced according to age, sex, and socioeconomic level. Socioeconomic class was evaluated using the frequency of /s/-lenition, given that speakers with linguistic insecurity exhibit higher rates of /s/-retention in their speech. Occupation and education were also used along with the /s/-criteria to classify speakers into one of two socioeconomic levels: middle or low. Using a mixed-effects logistic regression, the data were statistically analyzed to demonstrate the effect of sociolinguistic factors that trigger variable trill production in Dominican Spanish. Consistent with previous literature, all four variants of the trill were produced, with a preference towards pre-breathy voice preceding one occlusion, /ɦɾ/. For women and middle-class participants, there were more instances of trills with two or more occlusions and fewer instances of pre-breathy voice. The mixed-effects logistic regression showed that sex and socioeconomic level condition the production of pre-breathy voice and the number of occlusions in trills. These results suggest that this variable carries stigma in Dominican Spanish, due to its abundance in the speech of men and those of lower socioeconomic class. 

November 11, 2023  

Speaker: Matthew Pollock (Ph.D. student)  

“Crossing the Party Line: A sociophonetic comparison of the production and perception of Andalusian dialectal features in peninsular Spanish political discourse.”

Abstract:  

Performative style is a sociolinguistic variable that merits study among politicians, who often employ agentful patterns in their speech. Studying the speech of 32 Spanish politicians from Seville, Málaga, Córdoba, and Madrid, Spain, I focus on eight regional phonetic features of Andalusian Spanish, including novel fronting of the affricate /tʃ/, elision of coda /s/, word-final /s/, trill /r/, and intervocalic /d/, ceceo, seseo, and the neutralization of /l/ and /ɾ/. Speakers were balanced for sex, age, and party, and audio files were sought out in contexts including scripted speeches, interviews with male interlocutors, and interviews with female interlocutors.  Combining spectrographically-motivated impressionistic coding and acoustic markers, I use a mixed-effects logistic regression to determine linguistic and extralinguistic tendencies within the group. Following that, I use Lectal Focusing in Interaction to trace style-shifting over time in speech. There is considerable social variation across speakers, with influences of speech context, conversation topic, and speech formality all playing a role in variable use. While politicians do not strictly follow partisan norms, qualitative analysis of individual motivations can be used to augment quantitative variation. These results contribute not only to a sociolinguistic understanding of southern Spanish variation, but also to the link between political discourse and sociophonetic performance. While considerable research has been conducted in English, novel methodologies related to speaker attitudes and real-time variation have received little attention in other languages. Given the external stigma associated with southern peninsular Spanish and the paucity of sociophonetic study in this area, Andalusian Spanish provides an ideal context for analysis and comparison with research from other languages. By establishing similarities between identity formation and political speech in Spanish, the door opens to further comparative research.