Spanish phonetics and phonology in contact: Studies from Africa, the Americas, and Spain, 2020
The point vowels /i, a, u/ serve to mark the extremes of the acoustic vowel space; however, previ... more The point vowels /i, a, u/ serve to mark the extremes of the acoustic vowel space; however, previous experimental research on K'ichee' has shown that the acoustic location of point vowels varies according to the vowel inventory of the specific dialect of K'ichee'. The present study analyzes the acoustic vowel spaces of Guatemalan Spanish monolinguals and of Spanish-K'ichee' bilinguals from two K'ichee' dialects with different vowel inventories. The results of a production task reveal that the bilingual Spanish vowel spaces differ from those of monolinguals. Furthermore, although these bilinguals maintain cross-language differences in their mid vowels, their Spanish point vowels correspond in acoustic location to their K'ichee' point vowels, meaning they have similar acoustic vowel spaces in both languages.
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Papers by Brandon Baird
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009105767.027
to wear the traje típico, this matched-guise study investigates native Guatemalans’ perceptions of Mayan-accented Spanish produced by female voices. The results demonstrate that guises with features of Mayan-accented Spanish were more likely to have traje típico as a response than guises without these features. When compared to the previous studies with male-voiced guises, the findings suggest an interaction between gender and Mayan-accented Spanish. Traje típico responses were more common for female-voiced guises than male-voiced guises and occurred at the highest rate among female-voiced guises with features of Mayan-accented Spanish. Thus, gendered and cultural
practices are reflected in the indexical fields of Mayan-accented Spanish in Guatemala, regardless of the gender or ethnicity of the listener. That is, the visual body–language link is significantly more essentialized for the identity of a woman than for the identity of a man in Guatemala, suggesting that gendered stereotypes, language ideologies, and embodied practices mutually reinforce one another in the collective consciousness of the region.
Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions:
This study examines prosodic contrastive focus marking in the Spanish of 24 simultaneous K'ichee'-Spanish bilinguals via the following research questions: (a) How do K'ichee'-Spanish bilinguals prosodically mark contrastive focus in Spanish? (b) Is there evidence of K'ichee' influence in Spanish prosody and is this possible K'ichee' influence correlated with the language dominance of the bilinguals?
Design/Methodology/Approach:
Participants produced utterances in both broad and contrastive focus conditions via a question-answer task.
Data and Analysis:
Tonic syllables of 1,638 target words were analyzed according to Land H-tone alignment and the rise of the pitch contour. Data were analyzed via linear mixed-effects models according to pragmatic condition (categorical effect) and language dominance (continuous effect).
Findings/Conclusions:
Results indicate gradient effects of language dominance of possible K'ichee' influence. Spanish-dominant bilinguals tend to prosodically mark contrastive focus to a greater degree than K'ichee'-dominant bilinguals. It is proposed that this may be due to the different focus marking strategies between K'ichee' and Spanish. K'ichee' primarily marks contrastive focus syntactically whereas it is much more common in Spanish to only mark contrastive focus prosodically.
Originality:
This study employs a modified version of the question-answer task, which uses video clips to elicit the data in order to include participants with low literacy rates and control the elicitations. It also provides one of the first analyses of intonation in Guatemalan Spanish and the task and data allow for direct comparisons with the K'ichee' data produced by these same bilinguals (Baird, 2018).
Significance/Implications:
These results parallel those of similar studies: among bilinguals, the syntactic focus marking strategy of one language may affect the prosodic contrastive focus marking strategy of their other language. Additionally, the use of language dominance as a continuous variable expands our understanding of inter-speaker variation in such studies.
Results demonstrate that the participants produce lower L tones in Spanish than in K'ichee' regardless of language dominance. However, the speakers produce higher H tones in their non-dominant language than in their dominant language and K'ichee'-dominant bilinguals produce larger between-language differences in pitch span than Spanish-dominant bilinguals. It is argued that these findings may correspond to the frequency code, in that a higher pitch may be a manifestation of the bilinguals' uncertainty or lower level of confidence when speaking their less-dominant language.
Available at: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/697585?journalCode=ijal