Naomi Lapidus Shin

The Development of NP Selection in School-Age Children: Reference and Spanish Subject Pronouns

To investigate the development of the NP selection process, preferences for overt or null Spanish subject pronouns were elicited from 139 children (5;09 to 15;08) and 30 adults in Mexico. Participants were told stories in which consecutive grammatical subjects shared the same referent (same-reference), or did not (switch-reference). In the stories, overt pronouns in same-reference were redundant, and null pronouns in switch-reference rendered reference ambiguous. Adult participants preferred null pronouns in same-reference contexts and overt pronouns in switch-reference contexts, demonstrating an avoidance of redundancy and ambiguity. Children demonstrated a tolerance for redundancy well into adolescence. A tolerance for ambiguous reference declined at age eight/nine and then progressively decreased with age. We interpret the tolerance for ambiguity as an indication that children have difficulty with perspective taking when faced with complex structures and tasks.

Social class and gender impacting change in bilingual settings: Spanish subject pronoun use in New York

This study examines the role of social class and gender in an ongoing change in Spanish spoken in New York City (NYC). The change, which has to do with increasing use of Spanish subject pronouns, is correlated with increased exposure to life in NYC and to English. Our investigation of six different national-origin groups shows a connection between affluence and change: the most affluent Latino groups undergo the most increase in pronoun use, while the least affluent undergo no change. This pattern is explained as further indication that resistance to linguistic change is more pronounced in poorer communities as a result of denser social networks. In addition we find a women effect: immigrant women lead men in the increasing use of pronouns. We argue that the women effect in bilingual settings warrants a reevaluation of existing explanations of women as leaders of linguistic change. (Language change, social class, gender, bilingualism, Spanish in the US, pronouns) *

Acquiring constraints on morphosyntactic variation: children's Spanish subject pronoun expression

Constraints on linguistic variation are consistent across adult speakers, yielding probabilistic and systematic patterns. Yet, little is known about the development of such patterns during childhood. This study investigates Spanish subject pronoun expression in naturalistic data from 154 monolingual children in Mexico, divided into four age groups: 6-7, 8-9, 10-11, 12+. Results from logistic regressions examining five predictors of pronoun expression in 6,481 verbs show that childrens usage is structured and patterned. The study also suggests a developmental progression: as children get older, they become sensitive to more constraints. I conclude by suggesting that children learn patterns of variation by attuning to distributional tendencies in the input, and that the more frequent the patterns are, the easier they are to detect and learn.

Efficiency in lexical borrowing in New York Spanish

Abstract One manifestation of a general drive for efficiency in communication is the tendency to shorten high-frequency words and phrases. In situations of language contact, the drive for efficient communication is intensified. The demonstration of efficiency hinges on the simple observation that not all the words of a receiving language are displaced, and on the detailed observation of which words are retained and which are replaced by loanwords. Many loanwords fill a conceptual gap, but many do not; this study focuses on the latter. It is proposed that these loanwords instantiate efficiency in language behavior, as the borrowing process replaces comparatively longer words with comparatively shorter ones. On average, the length difference between displaced native words and borrowed loanwords is much higher than that between retained native words and potential loanwords that were not borrowed. To investigate this process of selective borrowing driven by efficiency, English lexical insertions were extracted from the spoken Spanish of bilingual Latinos in New York and compared with two control corpora. These results indicate that the lexical borrowing process targets pairs of words that result in especially large savings in word-length and spares those where borrowing would produce little or no savings, demonstrating that efficiency is a significant factor in explaining borrowing behavior.

La nueva frontera: Spanish-Speaking Populations in Central Washington

Abstract Washington State, demographically speaking, represents the northernmost boundary, la nueva frontera, of what might now be called the Spanish speaking West. Previously, Spanish speakers in the West were concentrated mostly in the Southwest. However, in recent years the Hispanic population of the U.S. has steadily grown, with the result that it forms the largest minority group in the nation, extending into areas that traditionally have not had significant Hispanic communities, including the Pacific Northwest. Little research to date has been carried out on the Spanish-speaking Hispanic populations in that region, particularly in interior Washington. This article seeks to begin to fill that research lacuna. Analyses of U.S. Census data, as well as sociolinguistic interviews with Washington Hispanics, indicate that what used to be the Spanish-speaking Southwest can now be subsumed under the broader ‘Spanish-speaking West,’ with Washington at its northernmost border.

Bilingual and Monolingual Children’s Patterns of Syntactic Variation: Variable Clitic Placement in Spanish

This study addresses whether monolingual and bilingual Spanish-speaking children differ in their acquisition of grammar by examining direct object clitic placement in children’s narratives. Specifically, we analyze contexts where either proclisis or enclisis is possible (Lo voy a ver ~ Voy a verlo). Corpus studies of adult monolingual Spanish show that proclisis is more frequent than enclisis. Furthermore, variation between proclisis and enclisis is constrained by linguistic factors, such as verb lexeme. We hypothesize that if bilingual children’s Spanish syntax is influenced by English, they will (i) produce higher rates of enclisis, and (ii) display decreased sensitivity to factors that constrain variation. One previous study of bilingual children suggests that English influences Spanish clitic placement. Perez-Leroux, Cuza, and Thomas (Biling Lang Cogn 14(02):221–232, 2011) asked children to repeat sentences with proclisis and enclisis, and found that bilingual children reordered sentences with proclisis, and produced enclisis instead. In contrast, research on adult bilinguals’ production of proclisis/enclisis suggests no impact of English on Spanish. In fact, bilingual adults’ proclisis rates are similar to those of monolingual adults, and the same linguistic factors constrain variation between proclisis and enclisis among monolinguals and bilinguals alike (e.g. Gutierrez M, Hisp Res J 9(4):299–313, 2008; Peace M, Southwest J Linguist 31(1):131–160, 2013). Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no previous research has examined variable clitic placement in bilingual children’s naturalistic production data.