Metalinguistic Intuitions and Dominant Language Transfer in Heritage Spanish Syllabification

Abstract

While heritage speakers of Spanish have been shown to differ from monolingual speakers along many morphosyntactic lines, comparatively few studies in heritage linguistics have focused on phonology. To test whether the knowledge of English phonotactics would influence Spanish-English heritage speaker syllabification patterns in Spanish, 29 heritage and 29 monolingual speakers of Spanish completed a paper-and-pencil syllabification task in which they divided 80 Spanish words into syllables. Stimuli were controlled for comparisons between Spanish and English phonotactic constraints. Specific attention was placed on the syllabification of vocalic sequences as diphthongs or hiatus. Based on the distribution of diphthongs in English, and the findings of cognate effects in a similar study by Zárate-Sández (2011), heritage speakers were predicted to break diphthongs into hiatus more often in cognates than noncognates, more often when the English translation of a cognate presented hiatus, more in rising diphthongs than in falling diphthongs, and more often when a rising diphthong contained a palatal rather than velar glide. These effects were all present in heritage speaker results. No significant effects were found for monolingual controls. These findings offer new data to the understudied field of heritage phonology and to the ongoing discussion of dominant language transfer effects.

Linguistic phenomena at play in the Saudi EFL classroom

“…One of the most important aims of the present study was to measure the correlation between metalinguistic awareness and language dominance in the case of bilingual learners in the Saudi context. This study renews the finding of previous studies on language dominance (Cokely, 2012;Robinson Anthony et al, 2020;Shelton et al, 2017). According to Robinson et al (2020) metalinguistic transfer has been demonstrated to be associated with patterns of language dominance in the same way as studies of lexical processing have been.…”

“…In summary, the participants indicate that extremely young multilingual youngsters are capable of accurately reporting their language skills. Additionally, a study by Shelton et al (2017) determined if bilingual Spanish speakers and monolingual Spanish speakers behave differently while syllabifying words in their native language. The findings of a syllabification exercise indicate that the phonotactic patterns of a (societally) dominant language can have an effect on metalinguistic intuitions about syllabification in the heritage language.…”