Publications
The morphophonological dimensions of Spanish gender marking: NP processing in bilinguals
Pérez-Leroux, A, Colantoni, C, Chen, C., Thomas, D.
Abstract
The processing literature provides some evidence that heritage Spanish speakers process gender like monolinguals, since gender-marking in definite articles facilitates their lexical access to nouns, albeit these effects may be reduced relative to speakers who learned the language as majority language. However, previous studies rely on slowed-down speech, which leaves open the question of how processing occurs under normal conditions. Using naturalistic speech, our study tests bilingual processing of gender in determiners, and in word-final gender vowels.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 18, December 2024
Acoustic properties of word-final vowels and the acquisition of gender in Spanish-English heritage speakers.
Colantoni, L. & Pérez Leroux, A.
Abstract
This chapter explores whether contact-induced reduction in the inventory of Spanish unstressed vowels due to contact with English impacts the development of gender morphology and concord in Spanish-English bilinguals, through the comparison of recent findings from narratives elicited from bilingual adults and children born in the US. Final unstressed /a, e, o/ were acoustically analyzed and noun phrases were grammatically analyzed. Adult early bilinguals displayed a large degree of vocalic overlap but were highly accurate in gender. Children showed variability in their patterns of vocalic overlap and in gender accuracy ranging between 66% to 100%. Results do not offer a strong support for the hypothesis of a phonetic contribution to heritage gender divergence and call for refined analyses of the interaction between phonetics and morphosyntax in gender acquisition.
Multilingual acquisition and learning: An ecosystemic view of diversity, E. Babatsouli (ed.), pp. 380-402. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2024
The Phonetic and Morphosyntactic Dimensions of Grammatical Gender in Spanish Heritage Language
Pérez-Leroux, A. T., López, Y. Á., Barreto, M., Cuza, A., Marinescu, I., Yang, J., & Colantoni, L.
Previous studies disagree as to whether heritage bilinguals demonstrate loss of knowledge of Spanish grammatical gender. As phonetic variability is known to affect the acquisition of certain grammatical markers, we examine whether bilinguals’ gender difficulties relate to bilingual contact-induced phonetic variability, namely, reduction in the inventory of word-final unstressed vowels.
Heritage Language Journal, 20(1), 1-37 – June 2023. Full Article.
A Phonetic Account of Spanish-English Bilinguals’ Divergence with Agreement
Laura Colantoni, Ruth Martinez, Natalia Mazzaro, Ana T. Pérez-Leroux and Natalia Rinaldi.
Does bilingual language influence in the domain of phonetics impact the morphosyntactic domain? Spanish gender is encoded by word-final, unstressed vowels (/a e o/), which may diphthongize in word-boundary vowel sequences. Full Article.