Uh, bueno, em… : Filled pauses as a site of contact-induced change in Boston Spanish

Abstract

There is mounting evidence that the filled pauses that pervade spontaneous speech constitute a rich site of linguistic inquiry. The present study uses a comparative variationist method to explore possible effects of language contact on pause behavior, examining 3810 filled pauses produced by 24 Spanish-speaking residents of Boston, Massachusetts. Interspeaker differences in pause behavior correlate with intensity of contact. Participants who have lived in the United States for a larger fraction of their lives, who use English more frequently, and who do so more proficiently fill pauses differently when speaking Spanish than do those who have spent less time in the contact setting and whose English skills and usage are more restricted. Results show that a greater degree of contact corresponds to increased use of centralized vowels in phonologically filled pauses (i.e., more frequent use of [a(m)] and [ə(m)] at the expense of [e(m)]). This pattern is interpreted as evidence of contact-induced change.

Between Äh(m) and Euh(m): The Distribution and Realization of Filled Pauses in the Speech of German-French Simultaneous Bilinguals

“…Effects of contact between languages on the production of FPs, akin to that observed in Hlavac (2011), are similarly found in the phonetic domain, as in the case of Spanish speakers residing in the northeastern United States: The more frequently they communicate in English with others, and the longer they have spent in the US, the more likely their FP vowel in Spanish is to deviate from the typical [e], towards a more centralized form as commonly used in English (Erker & Bruso, 2017). This provides support for the view that FPs may constitute a setting for change induced by language contact, in both quantitative and qualitative ways.…”

Filled Pauses Are Susceptible to Cross-Language Phonetic Influence

“…The situation of sustained, cross-generational contact between Afrikaans and Spanish is not, to our knowledge, replicated in any other region in the world. In our analysis, we have gone beyond the impressionistic description of FP usage in bilingual speech-our research represents an important step in obtaining an objective, acoustic analysis of bilingual data produced in a spontaneous setting (see also Erker & Bruso, 2017;Lo, 2019). Specifically, we focused on the relative use of three different types of FPs (categorical analysis), as well as on vowel quality and segmental durations (continuous analysis).…”

“…The results of our study, therefore, suggest that FPs are controlled by the same phonetic principles that govern lexically contentful speech. The issue of how FPs are incorporated into a bilingual's grammar on a more abstract level is an open question in linguistic research (Erker & Bruso, 2017;Fruehwald, 2016;Tian et al, 2017)-in fact, Clark and Fox Tree (2002) go as far to suggest that FPs are words, signaling different lengths of delay. As mentioned in the introduction, others propose a conflation between FPs, discourse markers, and lexical items (e.g., Graham, 2013;Swerts et al, 1996).…”

Like in English and como, como que, and like in Spanish in the speech of Southern Arizona bilinguals

“…Like has now been documented not only in American English, but in other English-speaking countries, including Canada (D’Arcy, 2005, 2017), England (Andersen, 2001), and Australia (Miller, 2009). The use of como in Spanish as a discourse marker equivalent to like appears to have been a recent development, found in the speech of both Spanish-English bilinguals (Erker & Bruso, 2017; Jimenez & Flores-Ferrán, 2018; Kern, 2014; Said-Mohand, 2008; Sánchez Muñoz, 2007) and Spanish monolinguals (Jørgensen & Stenström, 2009). In addition to como , the use of como que (Jimenez & Flores-Ferrán, 2018; Jørgensen & Stenström, 2009; Kern, 2014; Mata, 2016) and like (Kern, 2014; Mata, 2016) have been observed in Spanish as equivalents of like in English.…”