Gender comprehension and vowel production: Are they related?
Document Type
Paper Presentation
Presenter Language
English
Research Area
Bilingualism and multilingualism
Location
MBSC Dodge Room 302
Start Date
18-10-2024 9:00 AM
End Date
18-10-2024 9:30 AM
Abstract
Spanish gender divides nouns into two predictable morphological classes, most frequently marked by word-final unstressed /a o/ vowels.[1] These vowels undergo mergers and centralization in heritage Spanish-English speakers (HSs).[2,3] Unlike monolingual children, who learn gender early using noun phonology4, HSs make gender errors into adulthood.[5,6] Gender aids sentence processing: monolinguals show anticipatory effects on nouns when the determiner expresses gender, but results for bilinguals are complex.[7,8] Are bilingual effects in syntactic processing (i.e. no anticipation from the gender-marked determiner) in HSs predicted from vowel reduction? Two existing corpus studies [6,9] do not establish a clear link. Our study tests the hypothesis that HSs’ patterns of word final vowel realization may trigger systemic changes in gender marking in bilinguals.[10]
We tested Heritage speakers born in the US/Canada or immigrated before adolescence (n=17), and adult Spanish-speaking immigrants (ASI; n=19) who emigrated to Canada later. A naming task determined speakers’ familiarity with the experimental stimuli and provided data for acoustic analyses of unstressed /a e o/ final vowels (F1-F2 formants, 243 tokens per participant). An eye-tracking task, implemented in a Tobii Pro Fusion system at 120 Hz, presented three images with an unspliced audio prompt; stimuli were controlled for gender, animacy, noun morphology, and determiner (def/possess), counterbalanced across participants. Proportion of gaze fixations to target were extracted in two windows to test retrieval advantage in W1 (noun onset to offset; effect of determiner) and W2 (offset+300ms, effect of noun ending).
A linear mixed effects model with determiner and group as independent variables revealed that, during W1, ASIs have a higher proportion of looks to target than HSs in trials with the definite determiner. By W2, group and determiners were significant, with HSs showing fewer fixations to target than controls. Thus, HSs’ performance does not indicate an anticipatory effect but suggests a facilitatory effect (i.e., eye movements as the identity of the noun unfolds). ASIs’ performance is consistent with their vowel production which does not show overlap. These findings might be consistent with the view that morphology and dispersion in the vocalic space may interact in shaping the gender agreement system in heritage bilinguals.
References
[1] Clegg, J. H. (2011). A frequency-based analysis of the norms for Spanish noun gender. Hispania, 94(2), 303-319.
[2] Menke, M. (2010). Examination of the Spanish vowels produced by Spanish-English bilingual children. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 28(2), 98-135.
[3] Mazzaro, N., Colantoni, L., & Cuza, A. (2016). Age effects and the discrimination of consonantal and vocalic contrasts in heritage and native Spanish. In C. Tortora, M. den Dikken, I. Montoya, & T. O’Neill (Eds.), Romance Linguistics 2013: Selected papers of the 43th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), New York, 17-19 April, 2013 (pp. 277-300). John Benjamins.
[4] Culberston, J., Jarvinen, H., Heggarty, F., and Smith, K. (2019). Children’s sensitivity to phonological and semantic cues during noun class learning evidence for a phonological bias. Language 95: 268–93.
[5] Montrul, S., & Potowski, K. (2007). Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11(3), 301-328. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069070110030301
[6] Pérez-Leroux, A. T., López, Y. Á., Barreto, M., Cuza, A., Marinescu, I., Yang, J., & Colantoni, L. (2023). The Phonetic and Morphosyntactic Dimensions of Grammatical Gender in Spanish Heritage Language Acquisition, Heritage Language Journal, 20(1), 1-37. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15507076-bja10017
[7] Baron, A., Connell, K. and Griffin, ZM. (2022). Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition in School-Age Spanish-English Bilingual Children. Frontiers in Psychology 13: 788076. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.788076
[8] Lew-Williams, C., and Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science, 18, 193–198.
[9] Colantoni, L., R. Martínez, N. Mazzaro, A. T. Pérez-Leroux, and N. Rinaldi. (2020). A Phonetic Account of Spanish-English Bilinguals’ Divergence with Agreement. Languages, 5(4), 58. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5040058
[10] Scontras, Gregory, Zuzanna Fuchs, and Maria Polinsky. (2015). Heritage language and linguistic theory. Frontiers in Psychology 6: 15–45.
Gender comprehension and vowel production: Are they related?
MBSC Dodge Room 302
Spanish gender divides nouns into two predictable morphological classes, most frequently marked by word-final unstressed /a o/ vowels.[1] These vowels undergo mergers and centralization in heritage Spanish-English speakers (HSs).[2,3] Unlike monolingual children, who learn gender early using noun phonology4, HSs make gender errors into adulthood.[5,6] Gender aids sentence processing: monolinguals show anticipatory effects on nouns when the determiner expresses gender, but results for bilinguals are complex.[7,8] Are bilingual effects in syntactic processing (i.e. no anticipation from the gender-marked determiner) in HSs predicted from vowel reduction? Two existing corpus studies [6,9] do not establish a clear link. Our study tests the hypothesis that HSs’ patterns of word final vowel realization may trigger systemic changes in gender marking in bilinguals.[10]
We tested Heritage speakers born in the US/Canada or immigrated before adolescence (n=17), and adult Spanish-speaking immigrants (ASI; n=19) who emigrated to Canada later. A naming task determined speakers’ familiarity with the experimental stimuli and provided data for acoustic analyses of unstressed /a e o/ final vowels (F1-F2 formants, 243 tokens per participant). An eye-tracking task, implemented in a Tobii Pro Fusion system at 120 Hz, presented three images with an unspliced audio prompt; stimuli were controlled for gender, animacy, noun morphology, and determiner (def/possess), counterbalanced across participants. Proportion of gaze fixations to target were extracted in two windows to test retrieval advantage in W1 (noun onset to offset; effect of determiner) and W2 (offset+300ms, effect of noun ending).
A linear mixed effects model with determiner and group as independent variables revealed that, during W1, ASIs have a higher proportion of looks to target than HSs in trials with the definite determiner. By W2, group and determiners were significant, with HSs showing fewer fixations to target than controls. Thus, HSs’ performance does not indicate an anticipatory effect but suggests a facilitatory effect (i.e., eye movements as the identity of the noun unfolds). ASIs’ performance is consistent with their vowel production which does not show overlap. These findings might be consistent with the view that morphology and dispersion in the vocalic space may interact in shaping the gender agreement system in heritage bilinguals.
References
[1] Clegg, J. H. (2011). A frequency-based analysis of the norms for Spanish noun gender. Hispania, 94(2), 303-319.
[2] Menke, M. (2010). Examination of the Spanish vowels produced by Spanish-English bilingual children. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 28(2), 98-135.
[3] Mazzaro, N., Colantoni, L., & Cuza, A. (2016). Age effects and the discrimination of consonantal and vocalic contrasts in heritage and native Spanish. In C. Tortora, M. den Dikken, I. Montoya, & T. O’Neill (Eds.), Romance Linguistics 2013: Selected papers of the 43th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), New York, 17-19 April, 2013 (pp. 277-300). John Benjamins.
[4] Culberston, J., Jarvinen, H., Heggarty, F., and Smith, K. (2019). Children’s sensitivity to phonological and semantic cues during noun class learning evidence for a phonological bias. Language 95: 268–93.
[5] Montrul, S., & Potowski, K. (2007). Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 11(3), 301-328. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069070110030301
[6] Pérez-Leroux, A. T., López, Y. Á., Barreto, M., Cuza, A., Marinescu, I., Yang, J., & Colantoni, L. (2023). The Phonetic and Morphosyntactic Dimensions of Grammatical Gender in Spanish Heritage Language Acquisition, Heritage Language Journal, 20(1), 1-37. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15507076-bja10017
[7] Baron, A., Connell, K. and Griffin, ZM. (2022). Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition in School-Age Spanish-English Bilingual Children. Frontiers in Psychology 13: 788076. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.788076
[8] Lew-Williams, C., and Fernald, A. (2007). Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science, 18, 193–198.
[9] Colantoni, L., R. Martínez, N. Mazzaro, A. T. Pérez-Leroux, and N. Rinaldi. (2020). A Phonetic Account of Spanish-English Bilinguals’ Divergence with Agreement. Languages, 5(4), 58. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages5040058
[10] Scontras, Gregory, Zuzanna Fuchs, and Maria Polinsky. (2015). Heritage language and linguistic theory. Frontiers in Psychology 6: 15–45.