Register variation by Spanish users of English: The Nijmegen Corpus of Spanish English

Abstract

English serves as a lingua franca in situations with varying degrees of formality. How formality affects non-native speech has rarely been studied. We investigated register variation by Spanish users of English by comparing formal and informal speech from the Nijmegen Corpus of Spanish English that we created. This corpus comprises speech from 34 Spanish speakers of English in interaction with Dutch confederates in two speech situations. Formality affected the amount of laughter and overlapping speech and the number of Spanish words. Moreover, formal speech had a more informational character than informal speech. We discuss how our findings relate to register variation in Spanish.

Communication strategy used by Spanish speakers of English in formal and informal speech

“…In conclusion, our findings suggest that L2 speakers take account of the situational context and choose communication strategies based on the need for explicit information exchange. These findings contribute to earlier findings based on the same corpus (Kouwenhoven et al, 2018) showing that the speakers also took the situational context into account in how much they laughed (five times more often in the informal than in the formal parts of the recordings) and in how often they produced overlapping speech (four times as often in the informal than in the formal recordings).To answer to our third research question, we investigated whether individual speakers differed in the extent to which their communication strategy use was influenced by the formality of the situation. We found that the effect of formality varied significantly among individual speakers for six of the seven strategies for which we found formality effects.…”

“…Future studies may also investigate the effect of the speaker's language proficiency on communication strategy use. In the present study we did not include proficiency, since the proficiency levels of the Spanish speakers in the NCSE are divided rather unequally over a limited number of CEFR proficiency scores (see Kouwenhoven et al, 2018). All speakers used communication strategies, but further investigations are necessary to grasp how proficiency impacts communication strategy use and whether there is an interaction between proficiency and situational variation.…”

“…Our study is based on the Nijmegen Corpus of Spanish English (NCSE; Kouwenhoven, Ernestus, & Van Mulken, 2018). This corpus is set up for research purposes and holds recordings of one-on-one communication in English between 34 Spanish speakers (17 female, 17 male, age range from 19 to 25 years (M = 21.44 years, SD = 1.48 years) and a Dutch confederate in an informal, peer-to-peer conversation, and with another Dutch confederate in a formal interview.…”

“… 1. All examples given in this paper originate for the Nijmegen Corpus of Spanish English (Kouwenhoven et al, 2018). …”

The influence of social distance on speech behavior: Formality variation in casual speech

“…Labov (2006Labov ( [1966), Stolarski (2013) and Ernestus et al (2015), among others, studied how speakers address their audience in formal versus informal settings or when discussing formal versus informal topics of conversation. Kouwenhoven et al (2015) investigated informal versus formal speech as well, and examined speech behavior in non-native interaction. Here too, the subject of conversation was one of the main parameters of variation between the formal and informal condition.…”