Spanish Linguistics Commons^™

Differentiated Performance In Native And Instructed Nonnative Spanish: The Impact Of Task Demands And Individual Differences During Performance With Grammatical Gender, Martha Black

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Adult language learners demonstrate extensive variation and are believed to rely largely on explicit knowledge and declarative memory, directly impacting how target language input is processed, represented, and retrieved. The overarching aim of this thesis is to identify and better understand the factors that are most important for adult language acquisition by examining how linguistic features, task demands, and individual learner differences may impact performance with Spanish grammatical gender. This research seeks to draw principled conclusions about what knowledge types and memory systems language users exploit as proficiency develops. 115 language users of Spanish from diverse language backgrounds, including native …

Acquisition Of Main-Clause Wh-Questions In Egyptian Arabic-English And Spanish-English Bilingual Children, Riham H. Mohamed

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This dissertation examines the production and judgment of Egyptian Arabic (henceforth EA) main-clause wh-questions in EA-English bilingual children living in Ontario, Canada, or in the United Kingdom. The three comparison groups are EA monolingual children and EA monolingual adults living in Egypt, and first-generation Egyptian immigrants. The results are compared to previous research on the acquisition of obligatory subject-verb (S-V) inversion in Spanish wh-questions.

The focus of this study is to investigate the potential role of cross-linguistic influence in narrow syntactic structures. Until fairly recently, it was believed that only structures that exhibit syntax-pragmatics interfaces are vulnerable to cross-linguistic influence …

Fórmulas De Tratamiento En Ocaña, Colombia, Liceth Bohorquez Leon

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The paradigm of forms of address has been a recurrent topic of study from a sociolinguistic perspective. Voseo, tuteo and ustedeo are the forms of address used in the Hispanic world. Voseo expreses confidence and familiarity, while tuteo same as voseo, denotes confidence and familiarity. Finally, ustedeo has a connotation of formality, respect and distance. This thesis aims to examine how forms of address are used in Ocaña, Colombia, and the relationship between their use and the social factors that affect the choice of pronoun. To achieve this aim, a sociolinguistic survey was applied to 88 participants. The …

The Effects Of Multilingualism And Music Experience On Tone And Vowel Discrimination Ability, Niloufar Ansari Dezfuly

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study investigates the effects of language background (monolingual/bilingual and early/late bilingual exposure), knowledge of a tonal language and music experience on auditory discrimination by employing tone and vowel discrimination tasks. A total number of 8,769 observations were analyzed using logistic regression to answer the following questions: (1) Do vowel and tone discrimination abilities correlate with language background in diverse groups of speakers such as monolinguals and bilinguals of different types (early/late bilinguals)? (2) Does musical training affect tone and vowel discrimination? (3) Does knowledge of tonal language affect tone discrimination? The findings suggest that with regard to vowel discrimination, …

The Imitation Of Ecuadorian Assibilated Rhotics By Naïve Andalusian Speakers From Seville, Maria De La Esperanza Ruiz-Peña

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The purpose of the present thesis is to establish whether Flege’s “equivalence classification” (Flege, 1995, p. 239) operates in the same way in auditory imitation of an unfamiliar dialect as it does in second language (L2) acquisition of speech. In order to do so, this study investigates how Andalusian Spanish speakers imitate assibilated rhotics produced in Ecuadorian Spanish. Despite substantial growth in interest in D2 phonological acquisition in later years (e.g., Babel, 2009; Nielsen, 2011), little research has been done to determine whether the mechanisms that underlie the production of L2 are also responsible for the auditory imitation of an …

The Syntax-Pragmatics Interface: Intransitivity And Word Order In L3 Spanish, Diana M. Fernandez Acosta

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Until fairly recently, most researchers assumed that the acquisition of a second language (L2) and of a third (or subsequent) (L3/Ln) language were indistinguishable. This is not the case, as knowledge of two or more previous languages adds complexity to non-native acquisition. This study addresses the issue of crosslinguistic influence between three languages in view of two theories: (a) the L2 will always be the cause of crosslinguistic influence in an L3 (Bardel & Falk, 2012); (b) the determining factor for transfer is typological similarity between the languages in question (Rothman, 2010).

This study focuses on the L3 acquisition of …

Latino, Latina, Latin@, Latine, And Latinx: Gender Inclusive Oral Expression In Spanish, Katie Slemp

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Gender identity is a rapidly changing concept and so is the language that we use to talk about ourselves or others that may identify outside of the traditional binary system. Spanish typically functions as a masculine generic-dominated language, but there are attempts to make the language more inclusive. One of those attempts appeared in the early 2000s: -x. This marker is unpronounceable as a syllable nucleus. Via an online survey and virtual interviews, this project discovers how Spanish speakers from various countries incorporate gender inclusive language (IL) in writing and speech. Which speakers incorporate IL? Additionally, why do they …

Code-Switching In L2 Spanish: A Comparison Of French And English Learners, Liliana Montoya

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates whether L2 Spanish learners’ grammar intuitions on code-switching (CS) show evidence of the predictions made by the Functional Head Constraint (FHC) proposed by Belazi, Rubin, & Toribio (1994). Building on this theory, the present work supports the idea that L2 learners have an intuitive sense of code-switching well-formedness, i.e., they count on unconscious grammatical principles to produce code-switched utterances as well as to assess their grammaticality. Our primary research question is: given the usual absence of CS input that classroom L2 learners receive, will their grammar intuitions on CS show evidence of the predictions made by the …

Social Networks, Political Discourse And Polarization During The 2017 Catalan Elections, Rafael Monroig

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis investigates the political process in Spain and Catalonia during the Catalan election in December 2017. This regional election was unusual because of the independence process in Catalonia and its repression. Two parties, Ciudadanos (anti-independence) and Podemos (ambiguous position) and their leaders’ activity in Twitter was analyzed. It was explored from three perspectives: social networks, lexical and emotional discourse and ideological polarization. Firstly, social networks were used to see the properties of the support communities of both parties. Interestingly unlike Ps, Ciudadanos’ (Cs) metrics of cohesion showed that political communities of this party in Spain and Catalonia were remarkably …

Variation In The Pronominal Clitic System Of P'Urhépecha-Spanish Bilinguals, Itziri Moreno Villamar

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This dissertation investigates linguistic variation and optionality in the Spanish clitic system of bilingual L1 P’urhépecha speakers from Michoacán, México to determine if interference from L1 features results in non-standard use of accusative and dative pronouns in L2 Spanish. Using the theoretical framework on feature/morphology mapping in bilinguals by Lardiere (2000, 2005, 2009) and Sánchez’s theories of functional interference and convergence (2003), I investigated three phenomena occurring in Spanish and Amerindian contact varieties or amongst bilingual speakers: neutralization of gender (and number) into an invariant accusative clitic lo, omission of anaphoric clitics, and liberal accusative clitic doubling. I also investigated …

Input Y Fonf En La Adquisición De La Doble Negación En Español Por Angloparlantes, Yolanda Pangtay Chang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Dos factores importantes en la adquisición de una L2: estructura a adquirir y metodología de enseñanza, se estudian en esta tesis. En la negación en español L2, el cambio de la forma del inglés a una forma en principio más sencilla, puede necesitar reestructuración. El segundo factor, la metodología utilizada en su enseñanza, puede variar de manera importante de una clase a otra. Por lo tanto, surgen los siguientes cuestionamientos:

1) ¿Existe la reestructura de la L1 a la L2?

2) ¿Qué tipo de metodología ayuda a la reestructuración?

3) Si hay reestructuración, ¿es ésta permanente o no?

Para el …

Adquisición De Los Contrafactuales Pasados En Español: Mapeo De Formas – Significados En Las Interfaces Morfología – Sintaxis – Semántica – Pragmática, Diana Patricia Botero Ibarra

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This study focuses on the acquisition of the compound form of the Pluperfect Subjunctive to express counterfactual meaning in the past through conditional clauses. The aim was to examine in which instances we can find the greatest difficulty in the acquisition and what are the sets of information that stem from universal mechanisms.

This study included two experiments: Experiment 1 consisted of a sentence completion task and a written production task to investigate morphological recognition and morphological written production of subjunctive and conditional forms. Experiment 2 included an interpretation and context task, a sentence selection task, and a picture-matching task …

Producción De La Concordancia En Español Por Hablantes De Náhuatl, Alma P. Ramirez-Trujillo

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Esta tesis investiga la adquisición de la concordancia de género y número en el sintagma determinante, y de sujeto, verbo y objeto en el sintagma verbal por hablantes de náhuatl que hablan español como L2 (n=19) y por bilingües simultáneos (náhuatl-español) (n=6). Los resultados son contrastados con un grupo de control (n=5).

El español y el náhuatl son muy diferentes. El español dista mínimamente de otras lenguas romances, mientras que el náhuatl es una lengua polisintética sin género, el número está restringido a sustantivos animados, tiene que expresar concordancia de objeto y no tiene verbos infinitivos. La falta de concordancia …

“Alma” O “Arma”, Evidencia De La Neutralización /L/ /R/ En La Variedad Dialectal Andaluza De Sevilla, Maria De La Esperanza Ruiz-Peña

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The Andalusian variety of Spanish is characterized by a weakened articulation (Hualde, 2005). The purpose of the present study is to analyze and characterize liquid neutralization in this variety of Spanish. This experiment specifically provides new evidence on lateral rhotic alternation, quantifying the rate of lateral maintenance, substitution of laterals by rhotics, production of in between sounds and deletion in 40 Andalusian speakers of Spanish. In doing so, it rigorously examines the effect of a number of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. The linguistic factors comprised of number of syllables, stress, position (incomplete neutralization) and across word boundary. The extra-linguistic factors …

Mexican Temporary Agricultural Workers In Canada: A Language And Migration Approach, Maria Eugenia De Luna Villalón

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The purpose of this study is to fill a gap in the sociolinguistic research on language issues faced by temporary migrants. My research involves a compilation and analysis of the sociolinguistic facts relating to the situation of Mexican Temporary Agricultural Workers (MTAW) who come to Ontario and Quebec through the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). Following an ethnographic approach and methodology, I investigated the following research questions: 1). How do the biographic backgrounds –human capital- of MTAW restrict or allow them to renegotiate their identity and to be able to deal with their new social and linguistic environment? 2). What …