Editorial Letter

Editorial Letter

How Many Collocations do Heritage Speakers Know?

The current study examines a previously understudied dimension of heritage speakers’ lexical knowledge by focusing on verbal collocations. Two tests were designed in order to assess both receptive (recognition) and productive (recall) knowledge of sixty Spanish collocations. The collocations were divided into three types (congruent, partially congruent, and incongruent) based on a ratings survey that established their degree of correspondence with English. Participants’ language dominance and their use of Spanish in various daily activities were included as individual variables. The results indicate that the participants knew a vast majority of the collocations on the recognition test, but that their ability to recall the collocations was somewhat more limited. Congruency had a significant effect on participants’ performance, but this finding must be interpreted in light of the interaction between congruency and word frequency. Significant correlations were found between performance on both tests and language dominance, as well as a number of variables involving interaction in Spanish (text messaging) and exposure (listening to music, reading for fun). These data are discussed in relation to previous studies on the acquisition of collocations and heritage speakers’ knowledge of individual words.

Vulnerability in Heritage Speakers of Spanish in the Netherlands

Dissertation defense date: October 1, 2019 Supervisors:Prof. dr. Aafke Hulk, University of AmsterdamDr. Petra Sleeman, University of AmsterdamDr. Suzanne Aalberse, University of Amsterdam Defense Committee:Prof. dr. Jeannette Schaeffer, University of AmsterdamProf. dr. Judith Rispens, University of AmsterdamProf. dr. Enoch Aboh, University of AmsterdamDr. Maria del Carmen Parafita Couto, University of LeidenProf. dr. Jason Rothman, University of TromsøDr. Cristina Flores, University of Minho

The Production of /p, t, k/ among Heritage Speakers of Spanish in the United States

The present study explores whether heritage speakers of Spanish in the United States pronounce voiceless stops (/p, t, k/) differently in cognate words and non-cognate words in Spanish and in English depending on their degree of dominance in both languages. The acoustic measurement used to determine whether /p, t, k/ are pronounced differently or not is the Voice Onset Time (or VOT), which is longer for word initial /p, t, k/ in English whereas it is shorter in Spanish (Lisker & Abramson, 1964). This study analyzes the production data of 8 heritage speakers who completed the Bilingual Language Profile (or BLP) Questionnaire (Birdsong et al., 2012), a read-aloud task, and a follow-up interview. The results show that informants pronounce /p, t, k/ differently in English and in Spanish. Moreover, informants’ linguistic dominance influences their production of voiceless stops in English, but not as much in Spanish. A closer look at the data shows that informants’ language proficiency could be influencing their pronunciation of /p, t, k/ in Spanish. Furthermore, this study shows that there is an overall effect of cognate words in the production of voiceless stops in Spanish and English. The current study is of interest because it focuses on heritage speakers’ phonemic inventories, an understudied area of linguistics (Rao & Ronquest, 2015; Kim, 2018) and it combines the BLP Questionnaire and the follow-up interview to retrieve information about heritage speakers’ degree of bilingualism and linguistic attitudes. This methodology allows to explore how sociolinguistic attributes influence heritage speakers’ pronunciation.

On Loss, Gain, Acceptance and Belonging: Spanish in the Midwest

In this article, the authors analyze the creation of a performance piece in both English and Spanish with undergraduate students to creatively combine Latina/o/x oral histories and performance artists’ personal experiences as Spanish speakers. Each performer selected an oral history collected by one of the authors in the digital and publicly available archive, Oral Narratives of Latin@s in Ohio. Through a Latino Critical Race Theory framework, and an analysis of the undergraduate student performers’ and audience’s reactions, the authors demonstrate how this kind of performance can be used as a pedagogical tool to strengthen Spanish as a heritage language learners’ sense of belonging in predominantly white educational spaces by contesting epistemic violence and forging Latina/o/x networks of solidarity. Linguistic and cultural maintenance in the face of racialization is conceptualized as a tool for place-making and social justice, particularly in the Midwestern communities that have experienced backlash to growing Latino presence. The performance provides a model for future artistic work that harnesses the power of community cultural wealth as conceptualized by education and Latina/o studies scholar Tara Yosso (2005). Crucially, rather than insist on cultural and linguistic conformity for the sake of social and political unity, this work critically attends to the diversity among Latina/o/x experiences represented across the performance.