Naomi Shin

Spanish demonstratives encode speaker-referent and addressee-referent distance, displaying a sociocentric conceptualization of space. By contrast, English demonstratives encode speaker-referent distance, but not addressee-referent distance, reflecting a speaker-based egocentric conceptualization of space. To test the hypothesis that bilinguals transfer the way that space is encoded from one language into another, 41 Spanish-English bilinguals and 19 English-speaking monolinguals completed an elicited production puzzle task in which the addressee's position was manipulated: the experimenter either sat next to or across from the participant. The bilingual participants comprised two groups: 19 bilinguals who arrived in the U.S. as adults (“Adult Arrivals”) and 22 who were raised in the U.S. (“U.S.-raised”). Mixed-effects binary logistic regressions demonstrate that the Adult Arrivals were more likely to use esta ‘this’ rather than esa ‘that’ when the experimenter was across from rather than next to the participant, displaying a sociocentric conceptualization of space. By contrast, experimenter position did not impact the English monolinguals' demonstratives. Mirroring the English monolinguals, the U.S.-raised bilinguals' demonstratives were not conditioned by experimenter position – neither in English nor in Spanish – suggesting that these bilinguals transferred an egocentric conceptualization of space from English into Spanish. The findings contribute to our understanding of how bilingualism affects the cognitive processes invoked when using demonstratives and how age of onset of bilingualism and language dominance mediate such conceptual transfer.

The current study investigates the oral production of plural noun phrases (NPs) in subject position in Spanish and English among forty child heritage speakers of Spanish who were raised in the United States. Their results were compared with twenty-four monolingual children of similar ages from Mexico. We elicited determiner use in generic and specific contexts in Spanish and English. Results showed a high level of determiner omission with generic referents in Spanish but much less variability with specific referents, suggesting crosslinguistic influence from English. Spanish proficiency played a role in the extent of determiner omission in Spanish generic contexts. Regarding the children’s English, the results showed a high proportion of determiner overextension with generic referents but little variability with specific contexts, suggesting bilingualism effects in sorting out the genericity problem in English. The results are discussed along the lines of the Bilingual Alignment Hypothesis and recent proposals on the effects of proficiency and experience in heritage language acquisition.

This study investigates linguistic convergence in Spanish–English bilinguals’ demonstrative use in English ( this/that ) and Spanish ( este/ese ). Participants completed a task that tested the influence of speaker-referent distance on demonstrative use. Study 1 includes Spanish-speaking monolinguals in Mexico, English-speaking monolinguals in the USA, and Spanish–English bilinguals who were born in the USA or arrived at a young age. Results show that speaker-referent distance constrained all groups’ demonstrative use; however, this effect was weaker in the bilinguals’ Spanish as compared to the Spanish-speaking monolinguals. Study 2 focuses on the bilinguals’ demonstratives. Group-level and individual analyses present evidence for linguistic convergence: the bilinguals’ usage patterns were similar across their languages. Additionally, language dominance predicted usage patterns: the more English-dominant the participant, the greater the likelihood of producing proximal demonstratives for near and far referents alike. This pattern mirrors common diachronic changes, supporting the view that bilinguals may propel language change.

The limited research on bilinguals’ demonstratives suggests that bilingualism may result in a reduced number of demonstrative forms in bilinguals’ linguistic systems as well as a shift in the factors that constrain demonstrative usage. The current study investigates Spanish nominal demonstrative use among Spanish-speaking monolingual adults in Mexico and two groups of Spanish–English bilingual adults in New Mexico: Adult Arrivals, who were born and raised in a Spanish-speaking country, and U.S. Raised bilinguals, who were born in the U.S. or arrived by age seven. Proximal demonstratives este/esta ‘this’ and medial demonstratives ese/esa ‘that’ were elicited using a puzzle task. All groups varied between este/esta and ese/esa. The monolinguals were likelier than the bilinguals to produce ese/esa when referring to referents farther from themselves and closer to the addressee. Whereas the monolinguals and Adult Arrivals tended to produce este/esta rather than ese/esa when the experimenter selected the incorrect referent, thereby creating a misunderstanding, the U.S. Raised bilinguals showed the opposite trend. The findings are interpreted in the context of typological research indicating that distance between the addressee and the referent impacts demonstrative usage in Spanish but not English. It is hypothesized that increased exposure to English may correspond to reduced attention to the addressee when choosing which demonstrative to use.

This chapter reviews research on children’s monolingual and bilingual acquisition of linguistic variation to consider children’s role in language change. Many patterns of variation are learned early and veridically, but some are acquired late and may be more susceptible to change. Further, children sometimes regularize variable input and may create novel patterns when exposed to different dialects or languages, which suggests that contact settings can serve as breeding grounds for language change. The chapter thus turns to the topic of childhood bilingualism and reviews research on child heritage speakers, whose divergences from their input sometimes persist into adulthood. The chapter culminates by considering the implications of the research reviewed for socially informed models of language change and historical sociolinguistics.

The current study investigated overregularization of Spanish irregular past participles (e.g., dicho ‘said’, regularized as decido) among 20 child heritage speakers of Spanish in New Mexico, ages 5;1–11;9. Overregularization occurs when a child produces an irregular form analogously to its regular counterpart (e.g., eated instead of ate). Typically, children first produce the irregular form and then, after they have learned a morphological pattern, they overapply it to the irregular form. Ultimately, children retreat from overregularization and once again produce the target irregular form. While there has been a wealth of studies on monolingual children’s overregularizations, very few have investigated this phenomenon in child heritage speakers, who may develop their grammars diversely due to their exposure to the heritage language. This study analyzed the impact of age, Spanish language experience, Spanish morphosyntax proficiency, and lexical frequency on overregularization among the 13/20 children who produced past participles (n = 233) in response to an elicited production task. Participles were overregularized at high rates (74%), resulting in forms like ponido (‘put’, cf: puesto). Results from a regression analysis indicate that overregularization was more likely among the younger children, the children with lower morphosyntax scores, and with lower-frequency participles. Further, an interaction between morphosyntax score and lexical frequency indicated that children with higher scores overregularized with lower frequency participles, but not higher frequency ones, whereas children with low scores overregularized with both low- and high-frequency forms. In summary, child heritage speakers overregularize Spanish past participles at high rates, and the retreat from overregularization is tied to overall grammatical development and lexical frequency, suggesting that the acquisition of irregular participles is dependent on experiencing multiple instances of the irregular verb form.

Article Frontmatter was published on May 1, 2023 in the journal Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics (volume 16, issue 1).