Mechanisms of sub-phonemic change in prescriptive bilingualism: The case of Mexican Plautdietsch

This paper investigates the relationship between loanword adaptation and phonological borrowing by looking at the Mexican Plautdietsch speech community. Plautdietsch borrowings from Mexican Spanish sometimes undergo loanword adaptation to fit the native phonological system (e.g. Spanish [peso] > Plautdietsch [pəɪzo] 'peso'), but some community members exhibit a borrowed pattern of deaffrication that targets native lexical items (e.g. [dit͡ʃ ]) 'German' > [diʃ]). I show that the output of /t͡ʃ/ deaffrication in Mexican Plautdietsch follows the phonological pattern of northern Mexican Spanish deaffrication, rather than an inherited pattern that adapts loanwords from High German and Russian. I propose that while some mechanisms of phonetic and phonological interpretation are similar for both loanword adaptation and phonological borrowing, the novel Mexican Spanish pattern could have only entered the community due to the unique structure of phonological representation associated with advanced bilingualism. This prediction is borne out in the social distribution of deaffrication wherein men, who are expected to become advanced bilinguals, exhibit the innovation more than women. By adding a dimension of phonological representation to our models of loanword adaptation, we can expand the model's behavior to also account for outcomes involving the restructuring of the heritage language.

The prosodic properties of narrow information focus in Central Mexican Spanish: Pitch accents, de-emphasis and phrasing

This paper investigates the different prosodic strategies used for the marking of information focus in Central Mexican Spanish. For this purpose, we carried out a study of the prosodic properties of information focus both in clause final position and in situ. Our results show important differences when compared to other varieties of Spanish. Specifically, we observe that the most frequent accent signaling information focus is a monotonal pitch accent (L* or !H*) and not L+H*. Furthermore, in many cases we observe that the pitch accent is not the only mechanism used to signal the focus: this is because we observe the presence of prosodic edges to the left of the focus, presumably functioning as an additional prosodic cue to identify it. Additionally, while we do not observe deaccenting of post-focal material, we do observe a sequence of non-rising forms (a flat pattern or “de-emphasis”) following the pitch accent that signals an in situ information focus forced by the test. With respect to phonological phrasing, our results confirm the analysis in Prieto (2006), where it is proposed that syntactic constituency is not the primary factor that regulates phrasing in Spanish.

First-Person Plural Subject Pronoun Expression in Mexican Spanish Spoken in Georgia

Variationist research on subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Spanish typically incorporates all grammatical persons/numbers into the same analysis, with important exceptions such as studies focusing exclusively on first-person singular (e.g., Travis, Catherine E. 2005. The yo-yo effect: Priming in subject expression in Colombian Spanish. In Randall Gess & Edward J Rubin (eds.), Selected papers from the 34th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), 329–349. Amsterdam, Salt Lake City: Benjamins 2004; Travis, Catherine E. 2007. Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19. 101–135; Travis, Catherine E. & Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2012. What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics 23(4). 711–748), third-person singular (Shin, Naomi Lapidus. 2014. Grammatical complexification in Spanish in New York: 3sg pronoun expression and verbal ambiguity. Language Variation and Change 26. 303–330), and third-person plural subjects (Lapidus, Naomi & Ricardo Otheguy. 2005. Overt nonspecific ellos in Spanish in New York. Spanish in Context 2(2). 157–174). The current study is the first variationist analysis (to the best of my knowledge) to focus solely on first-person plural SPE. It is well-established that nosotros/nosotras exhibits one of the lowest rates of SPE relative to the other persons/numbers; however, factors conditioning its variation are less understood. Conversational corpus data from Mexican Spanish are employed to examine tokens of first-person plural SPE (n=660) in terms of frequency and constraints, incorporating factors such as TMA, switch reference, and verb class in logistic regression analyses. Results suggest that nosotros, like other subjects, is strongly impacted by switch reference and tense-mood-aspect (TMA). However, the TMA effect is unique in that preterit aspect is shown to favor overt nosotros relative to other TMAs, diverging from previous studies. Furthermore, verb class — a factor found to be repeatedly significant in the literature — is inoperative for nosotros. These results suggest that nosotros does not respond to the same factors as other persons/numbers. Additionally, the findings lend support to researchers regarding the importance of studying individual persons/numbers in subject variation research.

Spanish speakers’ English schwar production: Does orthography play a role?

This study examines how input mode – whether written or auditory – interacts with orthography in the production of North American English (NAE) schwar (/ɝ/, found in fur, heard, bird) by native Spanish speakers. Greater orthographic interference was predicted for written input, given the obligatory activation of orthographic representations in the execution of the task. Participants were L1 Mexican Spanish/L2 English speakers (L2, n = 15) and NAE (n = 15, rhotic dialect speakers). The target items were 10 schwar words and 10 words matched in graphemes to the onset and nucleus of the schwar words (e.g., bird was matched with big), for a total of 20 items. The degree of overlap between schwar productions across group and input mode (L2 only) was analyzed, followed by a generalized additive mixed model analysis of F3, one of the acoustic cues to rhotacization. Results showed that L2 schwar productions were different from the NAE productions in both the overlap and F3 measures, and the written input mode showed greater L1 orthographic interference than the auditory input mode, supporting the hypothesis that L1 orthography–phonology correspondences affect L2 productions of English schwar words.

Validation of the QLQ-CX24 questionnaire for the assessment of quality of life in Mexican women with cervical cancer

ObjectiveCervical cancer is the fourth most frequent neoplasm among women in terms of incidence and mortality. Health-related quality of life (HRQL) is an important outcome in oncology. The QLQ-CX24 instrument was developed to measure HRQL in patients with cervical cancer, and its Mexican-Spanish version had not been validated.MethodsBetween March 2018 and May 2019, Mexican women older than 18, with any-stage cervical cancer were invited to participate in the study. Patients answered the QLQ-C30 and QLQ-CX24 questionnaires. Current tests for psychometric and clinical validation were performed.ResultsThree hundred and thirty patients with cervical cancer were included in this study. All women invited to participate accepted and were included. The QLQ-CX24 internal consistency test demonstrated adequate convergent (Spearman correlation coefficient 0.001–0.847) and divergent validity (Spearman correlation coefficient <0.0001–0.45). Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of the three multi-item scales were >0.7 (minimum 0.76, maximum 0.89). Four scales of the QLQ-CX24 distinguished patients in different clinical stages. The evaluation of responsiveness demonstrated that the peripheral neuropathy scale was sensitive to change over time during chemo-radiation therapy. Six scales of the QLQ-CX24 instrument were associated with survival.ConclusionThe Mexican-Spanish version of the QLQ-CX24 questionnaire is reliable and valid for the assessment of HRQL in patients with cervical cancer.

Exploring a Loan Translation and Its Consequences in an Oral Bilingual Corpus

This work applies computational tools that have been used to model loanwords in newspaper corpora to an analysis of a loan translation in an oral bilingual corpus. The explicit goal of the contribution is to argue that a specific collocation found in a corpus of Spanish spoken in Texas, agarrar+NP (e.g., agarrar ayuda), is a loan translation that is calqued on English get+np support verb constructions (e.g., get help). We base our argument on the frequency and the linguistic distribution of the nonconventional usage within and between corpora and on the factors that favor its use. Our findings show that the overall frequency of agarrar is the same in Spanish in Texas as it is in the benchmark monolingual corpus of Mexican Spanish but that it is used differently in the two varieties, a difference that has grammatical, as well as semantic, ramifications.

Converging Evidence of Underlying Competence: Comprehension and Production in the Acquisition of Spanish Subject-Verb Agreement

A surprising comprehension-production asymmetry in subject-verb (SV) agreement acquisition has been suggested in the literature, and recent research indicates that task-specific as well as language-specific features may contribute to this apparent asymmetry across languages. The present study investigates when during development children acquiring Mexican Spanish gain competence with 3rd-person SV agreement, testing production as well as comprehension in the same children aged between 3;6 and 5;7 years, and whether comprehension of SV agreement is modulated by the sentential position of the verb (i.e., medial vs. final position). Accuracy and sensitivity analyses show that comprehension performance correlates with SV agreement production abilities, and that comprehension of singular and plural third-person forms is not influenced by the sentential position of the agreement morpheme. Issues of the appropriate outcome measure and the role of structural familiarity in the development of abstract representations are discussed.

Entonación de los enunciados aseverativos en el español de la Ciudad de México entre los años 1960 y 1970

This paper describes the prosodic features —with emphasis on the nuclear pitch accent— of the statements documented in the corpus “Norma lingüística culta” and “Habla popular de la Ciudad de México” (Lope Blanch, 1971, 1976). The prosodic description is carried out with the Autosegmental Metrical model and the analysis of sociolinguistic factors. Regarding the nuclear pitch accent L+H *, the statistical analysis showed two significant factors: narrow focus statements and the low level of education. The nuclear accent H * is more prevalent in men and the low level of education. By contrast we observed that the group of adults, the higher education and the broad focus statements favor the descending contour, which has lesser relation with vernacular patterns in Central Mexican Spanish.

Transcultural Adaptation and Validation of the Fear of COVID-19 Scale into MexicanSpanish

The new coronavirus, SARS-CoV2, causing the disease known as COVID-19, has repercussions at mental health level of the population. Aim: To validate into Mexican-Spanish the Fear of COVID-19 Scale. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted for transcultural validation and for psychometric properties in adults over 20 years of age. Using the international guidelines by Beaton and Guillemin; as well as Cronbach’s alpha and Pearson’s correlation coefficients. Results: In a total of 438 people who agreed to carry out the survey, a suitable transcultural validation was obtained as well as psychometric properties of the scale were assessed obtaining a Cronbach’s Alpha of 0.85 and a correlation coefficient of 0.2662 to 0.6906. Conclusion: A Spanish language validated instrument was obtained which is suitable to be used for the early detection of fear in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and to be able to implement actions for the prioritization of psychological and even psychiatric care.