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Evaluating Proficiency and Communicative Competence in Heritage Brazilian Portuguese
No full textIn the field of bilingualism, there is a need to better understand bilinguals’ language proficiency, and their communicative competence (Harrington, 2008; Hulstijn, 2015, Polinsky, 2018; Polinsky & Kagan, 2007). This is particularly crucial for heritage languages, which have been understudied in terms of language proficiency. The scarcity of research is even more pronounced for Brazilian Portuguese as a heritage language (xxxxxxxx). To address this gap, we developed an objective measure of proficiency for Brazilian Portuguese as a heritage or second language, based on the frequency of lexical items. This test has been both internally and externally validated (xxxxxxxx). Our test is modeled after Nation’s (1990) vocabulary levels test for English, providing an indirect measure of a speaker\u27s experience with the language. To further assess heritage speakers’ communicative competence, we conducted a semi-guided interview designed to elicit a wide range of language structures. Both assessments were administered to 19 heritage speakers of Brazilian Portuguese residing in the Northeastern United States. The results from the vocabulary test show a downward trend in accuracy, indicating that heritage speakers are more familiar with frequent lexical items and struggle with less common words (χ2(4) = 10.4, p \u3c .05). In the semi-guided interviews, participants\u27 performance was rated by two native Brazilian Portuguese speakers using specific functional rubrics that indicates which goals speakers are able to achieve in the target language, assessing participants communicative competence. A correlational analysis revealed a strong positive correlation between vocabulary knowledge and communicative competence (r = 0.52, p \u3c .05). We interpret these findings to suggest that the vocabulary test is a valid measure of language proficiency for heritage speakers. Adequate and efficient lexical knowledge appears to be essential for successfully achieving functional or communicative language tasks. Conversely, a less robust lexicon hinders the ability to meet these communicative goals in the target language. Additionally, we present preliminary data on the correlation between proficiency measures and sociolinguistic variables in heritage speakers of Brazilian Portuguese.
Keywords: Heritage Languages, Brazilian Portuguese, Communicative Competence, Proficiency, Lexical Knowledge, Language Assessment
References:
Harrington, M. (2008). Lexical facility: Size, recognition speed and consistency as dimensions of second language vocabulary knowledge. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137- 37262-8
Hulstijn, J. H. (2015). Language proficiency in native and non-native speakers: Theory and research. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Nation, I. S. P. (1990). Teaching and learning vocabulary. Heinle & Heinle Publishers.
Polinsky, M. (2018). Heritage languages and their speakers. Cambridge University Press. https://doi. org/10.1017/9781107252349
Polinsky, M., & Kagan, O. (2007). Heritage languages: In the ’wild’ and in the classroom. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-818X.2007.00022.
Syllable Merger in Moroccan Judeo-Spanish
Get PDFThis study examines syllable merger in Moroccan Judeo-Spanish (MJS), a variety of Spanish spoken by Sephardic Jews who resettled in Morocco after the 1492 expulsion from Spain. MJS, also known as haketía, retains features of Medieval Spanish while also having developed unique characteristics. By the mid-20th century, MJS had reached moribund status, with no monolingual speakers remaining. Focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Benoliel 1977[1926–28], Bénichou 1945), we identify three main processes for resolving vowel hiatus across word boundaries in MJS, all of which result in the merger of two syllables into one: gliding and diphthongization, coalescence, and deletion. In particular, unstressed high vowels /i,u/ become glides, mid vowels /e,o/ become mid glides without raising to high glides, and unstressed identical vowels coalesce into a single vowel. Phrasal nuclear stress on the initial vowel of a prepausal word blocks syllable merger. In prenuclear position, /o/ deletes before /u/, while /e/ deletes in a wider range of morpho-phonological contexts. /a/ is stable, never gliding nor deleting. Comparisons with contemporary Chicano Spanish (CS; Baković 2006, Colina 2009, Martínez-Gil 2016) and non-normative Northern Central Peninsular Spanish (NCPS; Hualde 2014) reveal cross-linguistic variation in hiatus resolution strategies. We demonstrate that MJS has a hybrid pattern that combines properties of syllable merger as attested in CS and NCPS. Using Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 2004[1993], McCarthy & Prince 1999), we formalize a phonological analysis of syllable merger in MJS. A high-ranking markedness constraint against onsetless syllables is the driver of various repair strategies, which emerge from an interaction with faithfulness constraints. Additionally, we show how a usage-based representation of the mental lexicon, as proposed in Exemplar Theory (Johnson 1997), can model word-specific variation in /e/-deletion as variability between two allomorphs: a full, unreduced form vs. a reduced form that already lacks the deleted vowel. By providing a detailed OT account of MJS syllable merger, this study underscores the importance of documenting and analyzing endangered languages like JS and contributes to a deeper understanding of Sephardic Spanish phonology as a linguistic system within the Hispano-Romance family.
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Keywords: phonology, hiatus resolution, syllable merger, Moroccan Judeo-Spanish, Optimality Theory
References
Baković, Eric. 2006. Hiatus resolution and incomplete identity. In Optimality-theoretic studies in Spanish phonology. Ed. by Fernando Martinez-Gil & Sonia Colina. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 62–73.
Bénichou, Paul. 1945. Observaciones sobre el judeo-español de Marruecos. Revista de Filología Hispánica 7. 209–58.
Benoliel, José. 1977[1926–28]. Dialecto judeo-hispano-marroquí o haquitía. Salamanca: Copistería Varona.
Colina, Sonia. 2009. Spanish phonology: A syllabic perspective. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Hualde, José Ignacio. 2014. Los sonidos del español. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, Keith. 1997. Speech perception without speaker normalization: An exemplar model. In Talker Variability in Speech Processing. Ed. by Keith Johnson & John W. Mullennix. San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 145–65.
Martínez-Gil, Fernando. 2016. Syllable merger in Chicano Spanish: a constraint-based analysis. In The Syllable and Stress: studies in honor of James W. Harris. Ed. by Rafael Núñez Cedeño. Boston: de Gruyter, pp. 139–86.
McCarthy, John, & Alan Prince. 1999. Faithfulness and identity in prosodic morphology. In The Prosody‑Morphology Interface. Ed. by René Kager, Harry Van Der Hulst & Wim Zonneveld. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 219–309.
Prince, Alan, & Paul Smolensky. 2004[1993]. Optimality theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Exploring an EIT as a tool for accessing sociophonetic knowledge
Get PDFElicited imitation tasks (EITs)—tasks that involve repetition of sentence-length stimuli—have received increased attention as tools for measuring general L2 proficiency and implicit knowledge of grammatical features (Kostromitina & Plonsky, 2022). The present study diverges from predecessors by exploring the use of an EIT for accounting for sociophonetic knowledge.
Complementing work on the acquisition of Peninsular phonetic/phonological variants (e.g., George, 2014), the present study investigates acquisition of /θ/ by 25 US learners of Spanish studying abroad in a 6-week immersion program in León, Spain. Learners completed an oral monologic role-play task and a 36-item Spanish EIT (Solon et al., 2019) modified to include Peninsular phonetic features, during their first and last weeks abroad. An at-home (AH) group of 15 second-year university Spanish learners completed the same tasks following a similar timeline. The modified EIT included 30 instances of [θ]. Audio-recorded EIT repetitions were assessed in three ways: (1) using Ortega et al.’s (2002) 5-point rubric for an overall proficiency score per learner, (2) for the number of lexical items containing [θ] successfully reproduced (regardless of pronunciation of the phone), and (3) for the number of instances of [θ] reproduced as [θ]. In the oral role-plays, potential contexts for /θ/ were identified (n = 1,230) and coded for realization. Mixed-effects regressions were used to examine change in EIT scores and [θ] usage over time.
Preliminary results suggest that learners studying abroad in Spain demonstrated increased ability to process [θ], as indicated by higher rates of repetition of lexical items containing [θ] at the end of the program than the beginning. Similar gains were not observed for AH learners, suggesting that improvement was not only the result of repeating the task. Nonetheless, rates of [θ] production were low even at Time 2. Learners’ increased ability to comprehend and repeat EIT content containing [θ] despite no concomitant increase in production suggests that learners gained sociophonetic knowledge during this short sojourn and that this knowledge gain likely would not have been captured by analyzing production alone. Findings support the utility of EITs as a tool for tracking acquisition of sociolinguistically variable phonetic/phonological features
Mtro.
No full textDescripción y usos del marcador “a ciencia cierta” en español.
El objetivo de este trabajo es describir los tres principales significados de a ciencia cierta en el español actual, sin dejar de lado el componente diacrónico como guía para entender sus valores semánticos. Esto se basa en los patrones argumentales y de subjetividad propuestos por Delbecque (2009) y Langacker (1985), relacionados con las nociones teórico-conceptuales de la intersubjetividad trabajadas por Maldonado (2018). La metodología para este análisis se fundamenta en un corpus exploratorio de aproximadamente 300 expresiones obtenidas mediante el Autómata Inteligente en Internet (AGEI) para los años 2022-2023. Además de la recursividad atenuativa que la frase fija a ciencia cierta posee en el español actual, y que no solo restringe su empleo en registros formales o en tipologías textuales específicas, este marcador compositivo presenta funciones que se entrelazan con los usos de cierto estudiados por Maldonado (2018). Sin embargo, no coinciden del todo debido al comportamiento morfosintáctico de construccionalización en términos de Trousdale (2013). Veamos los siguientes ejemplos en (1).
(1) a. Lo porvenir con una ciencia cierta/ Y por tal lo anunciaban a la gente/Error de gran escándalo y perjuicio supersticiosos (CORDE, 1630, Cartas y relaciones del descubrimiento del reino de Chile).
b. Instado: aclare quiénes son los familiares del Corregidor que les hostigaban en la cobranza del reparto, y si este estaba hecho por el Corregidor con arreglo a su permiso y tarifa, o ellos le habían alterado por sí o a nombre de aquel, causándoles esta nueva pensión, atraso y perjuicio; exponiendo aquí con claridad todo lo que sepa y le conste, o por noticia o de ciencia cierta (CORDE, España,1781, Cartas y relaciones).
c. Jamás he sabido a ciencia cierta si el SAT revisa bien las declaraciones de los contribuyentes que según ellos te exigen por tener uno dos o más patrones. La verdad es que es un misterio lo que le roba a uno el gobierno (SOCIALMENTION, México, 2022)
Perception of the Palatal Consonant in Yeísta Dialects: a Chilean Spanish Case Study
Get PDFI prepared my abstract in Latex and was hoping to submit as a PDF version of it so that special characters and formatting could be kept intact. Here is the copied and pasted version of the abstract, but I have also attached the PDF version to this submission. Perception of the Palatal Consonant in Ye ́ısta Dialects:a Chilean Spanish Case StudyKeywords: Perception, Chilean Spanish, yodStudies on the palatal consonant in Spanish, generally represented as /J/ or/j/, typically focus on its status in relation to /L/ within lle ́ısta dialects. Thereare very few that examine acoustic properties of the consonant e.g. Mart ́ınez-Celdr ́an, 2015 or look at perception of the consonant in ye ́ısta contexts e.g. D ́ıaz-Campos and Morgan, 2002; Shea and Renauld, 2014; Denbaum and Raynor2024. This present study examines perception of two allophones in ChileanSpanish of the phoneme, one acoustically confirmed to be an approximatizedfricative, denoted by [Jfi] and a affricate variant, denoted by [dZ].Previous literature states, both in descriptions of generalized Spanish andChilean Spanish, that ’weaker’ allophones of the phoneme i.e. fricative andapproximant variants occur in intervocalic contexts while the ’stronger’ allo-phones i.e. affricate or plosive variants occur before a pause or a nasal/lateralconsonant (Navarro Tom ́as 1918, 1956; Canfield 1962; Lope-Blanch 1966, 1970;Sadowsky and Salamanca 2011; Silva Fuenzealida 2018). In other words, theallophones are said to exist in complementary distribution, constrained only byphonetic context and not other factors. Thus, this paper examines the percep-tion of both variants in intervocalic contexts by speakers of Chilean Spanish.Participants were asked to complete two tasks: an AX discrimination task and aVisual Analog Slider (VAS) identification task. For the AX discrimination task,participants were presented with two realizations of a word containing /j/ in anintervocalic context e.g. botella (bottle). Each contained either the affricate orapproximant variation. Participants were asked if the tokens sounded the sameor different. For the VAS task, participants were given instances of tokens fromthe AX section, and were asked to rate the productions on several scales:1. Foreign sounding - Chilean Sounding2. Robotic Sounding - Human Sounding3. Incorrect Sounding - Correct SoundingThe second item was included for control since some of the stimuli were cre-ated synthetically. The results suggest that, in general, while Chilean speakerscannot distinguish between the two variants, there is a tendency for intervo-calic [Jfi] to be perceived as more ’Chilean’ and ’correct’, while intervocalic [dZ]is perceived as ’foreign’ and ’incorrect’. This therefore seems to verify previousliterature, at least for Chilean Spanish speakers, that [Jfi] but not [dZ] shouldoccur in intervocalic contexts
The Vanished Voices of The Caribbean: Spanish Colonialism and the Pre-Columbian languages in the first voyages
Get PDFThe Caribbean Antilles, where its islands stretch from the coast of Venezuela to Florida, has been inhabited by various societies since 4000 B.C., shaping its history alongside its inhabitants. Language is crucial to the definition of history, the most obvious facet of civilizations. While archaeology and ethnography have provided some clues about the origins of the Caribbean\u27s indigenous peoples, linguistic work has scarcely been discussed. For this reason, this work not only aims to provide a linguistic description of pre-Columbian Antillean languages but also to present, synthesize, and attempt to add linguistic analysis to the theoretical debate on the origins of these languages.
Drawing from contemporary documentation (Granberry & Vescelius, 2004) and information from unpublished texts (Bartolomé de las Casas, Ramón Pané), this paper contributes to the discussion on the linguistic origins of the Antilles. Despite the misconception that a single language was spoken on all these islands (De las Casas, 1875:325), some chroniclers have testified otherwise. At least four indigenous languages were spoken in the Greater Antilles: Taíno, Macorís, Ciguayo, and Guanahatabey (Pané, 1875; Arrom, 1975). Taíno originates from the northern Maipura of the Arawak family. At the same time, Ciguayo is theorized to come from the Tolan languages of the Honduras-Belize coast, and Macorís originates from Waroid populations east of Venezuela. In essence, the theory proposes that the Caribbean was initially populated by speakers of the Tolan family, only to be displaced by speakers of the Waroid family through creolization and linguistic contact (Granberry & Vescelius, 2004, p. 156). This notion is considerably more archaeological than linguistic due to the lack of linguistic analysis. This article argues against the process of creolization and displacement. These findings may be attributed to linguistic contact phenomena such as loans or calques but not to displacement or creolization
Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management Programs: Practitioner-Informed Baseline Capabilities
Get PDFThe National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE) conducted a work analysis to understand the core program-level elements of behavioral threat assessment and management (BTAM) implementation in support of BTAM research and capacity-enhancing efforts by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) and National Threat Evaluation and Reporting (NTER) Program Office
Enhancing walking performance in patients with peripheral arterial disease: An intervention with ankle-foot orthosis
Get PDFLower extremity peripheral artery disease (PAD) is a cardiovascular condition manifesting from narrowed or blocked arteries supplying the legs. Gait is impaired in patients with PAD. Recent evidence suggests that walking with carbon fiber ankle foot orthoses (AFOs) can improve patient mobility and delay claudication time. This study aimed to employ advanced biomechanical gait analysis to evaluate the impact of AFO intervention on gait performance among patients with PAD. Patients with claudication had hip, knee, and ankle joint kinetics and kinematics assessed using a cross-over intervention design. Participants walked over the force platforms with and without AFOs while kinematic data was recorded with motion analysis cameras. Kinetics and kinematics were combined to quantify torques and powers during the stance period of the gait cycle. The AFOs effectively reduced the excessive ankle plantar flexion and knee extension angles, bringing the patients\u27 joint motions closer to those observed in healthy individuals. After 3 months of the AFO intervention, the hip range of motion decreased, likely due to changes occurring within the ankle chain. With the assistance of the AFOs, the biological power generation required from the ankle and hip during the push-off phase of walking decreased. Wearing AFOs resulted in increased knee flexor torque during the loading response phase of the gait. Based on this study, AFOs may allow patients with PAD to maintain or improve gait performance. More investigation is needed to fully understand and improve the potential benefits of ankle assistive devices
Between the Temples
Get PDFThis is a film review of Between the Temples (2024), directed by Nathan Silver
Understanding Insider Threats: Learning from Related Research Streams
Get PDFThis state of science review summarizes practitioner-oriented and behavioral and social science literature related to insider threat. Practitioner perspectives reveal both overlapping and unique risk factors from cases of espionage, sabotage, and workplace violence. Social and behavioral science research points to the value of focusing on dynamic risk factors for engaging in destructive behaviors, as well as potential organizational interventions that could deter and mitigate insider threat risk