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Perceptual dialectology investigates nonlinguists’ beliefs about their own and other varieties. This paper fills a gap in longitudinal research in this area with a restudy of the perceptions of Miami Cubans carried out twelve years after the first study. Perceptions are examined in relation to social and demographic changes with a sample of 84 participants of Cuban origin who responded to a questionnaire about the correctness of regional varieties of Spanish. The results showed that perceptions of non-Cuban varieties remained relatively stable over time, continuing to correlate with race and poverty. Perceptions toward the Cuban Spanish of the Miami community were also stable and, as in the earlier study, were highly positive, reflecting strong beliefs in its correctness-status. In contrast, perceptions of Cuban Spanish on the island were significantly more negative; it was ranked the least correct of the regional varieties evaluated. Factors underlying perceptions are examined in relation to demographic changes, political ideology, and beliefs about race and poverty. This paper highlights the contribution of the longitudinal study of dialect perceptions to the understanding of language attitudes, intergroup relations, and language change.

Ethnicity of respondents has not been considered in the cognitive mapping of regional dialects, even though it has been shown to influence spatial perception in other social science fields. In this article, the authors draw on the findings of a cognitive mapping study, based on similar studies by Dennis Preston, that compared the behavior of two ethnolinguistic groups to examine whether linguistic and cultural experiences affect awareness of the Southern United States as a dialect area. They examined identification of the South in the hand-drawn maps of 83 Latinos and 148European Americans. They found that the European American group patterned with previous studies, marking the South in 99% of maps, while the Latino group marked the South in only 59% of maps. An ArcGIS analysis showed that agreement about its location reached over 95% for European Americans but only 80% for Latinos. They argue that Latino dialect awareness is influenced by linguistic socialization, cultural prominence, and social marginalization, which contribute to knowledge of regional variation and linguistic and social stereotypes.

Simultaneous speech and turn-taking patterns vary considerably across cultures. Research on varieties of Spanish has confirmed that frequent, lengthy overlaps within and between turns are common. In this paper it is suggested that when speakers engage in simultaneous talk, they observe Grice's Cooperative Principle by adjusting their utterances so that the informativeness of their contribution is minimized in overlap. This paper approaches the linguistic composition of overlaps by examining the information status and grammatical function of noun phrases within and outside of overlaps. The statistical findings indicate a tendency to avoid delivering new information in overlap, which suggests that speakers are indeed cooperating with their interlocutors by minimizing utterance informativeness during overlap.

Immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries bring their varieties of Spanish to the US and contribute to the ongoing development of those varieties in the new setting. In this paper, the variation of syllable final (r) is investigated in a group of Cuban immigrants in Miami. It reports on the linguistic and social factors that constrain variation of four variants (retention, assimilation, lateralization, and aspiration), particularly their generational and social distributions, with the goal of examining factors that contribute to negative perceptions of the island variety among Cubans in Miami (Alfaraz 2002). The findings indicated that the variants of (r) are constrained by a combination of linguistic and social factors, with following phonetic context having the strongest influence on retention, lateralization, and aspiration, but not on assimilation, on which generation had the strongest influence. For the four variants, generational differences were found: the older generation favored retention and aspiration, whereas the younger one favored assimilation and lateralization. The role of this distribution in shaping evaluations of the island variety is discussed.