This study examines whether language background, short-term exposure to monolingual and bilingual speech, and long-term exposure to monolingual and bilingual speech influences speech accommodation. To address this question, I examine whether English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals, either from a predominately monolingual community or a predominately bilingual community, vary their speech when interacting with a monolingual English speaker versus a Spanish-English bilingual speaker. Additionally, I examine whether speakers are more likely to converge after being primed with monolingual English or Spanish-English bilingual speech. To test this, participants complete an interactive communication task, where they are presented with a 6x6 board on a computer screen and asked questions about the words on the board, which contain variables that differ in English and Spanish. Results show that both language background and long-term exposure to monolingual or bilingual speech in a speaker’s speech community influence accommodation.

Abstract. This research examines the influence of prosodic shape, token frequency, and recency on comparative form preferences in English. To examine this, participants completed an unprimed and a primed forced-choice acceptabilityjudgment task. While the unprimed study's results show that comparative form selection is largely influenced by an adjective's prosodic shape and token frequency, the primed study shows that recency also plays a role in comparative form selection. More specifically, when primed with a synthetic comparative, participants were less likely to choose the comparative form that the adjective typically occurs in. These results are paralleled by the reaction time results, suggesting that recency of a synthetic comparative may cause either a facilitatory or inhibitory effect when selecting a comparative form.Keywords. comparatives; prosodic shape; frequency; recency; priming 1. Introduction. In English, there are two comparative forms for adjectives: the synthetic comparative, formed with -er (e.g., easier, smarter), and the analytic comparative, formed with more (e.g., more famous, more clever). For many adjectives, English speakers prefer one form over the other. For example, easier is typically preferred over more easy, and more famous is typically preferred over famouser. These preferred comparative forms occur more frequently than the less preferred forms: In the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies 2008-), easier occurs over 30,000 times, while more easy occurs fewer than 100 times; and more famous occurs over 500 times, while famouser occurs only 3 times. Importantly, however, both forms occur. In this paper, I investigate what causes English speakers to select either the synthetic or the analytic comparative form, specifically examining the role of prosodic shape, token frequency, and most importantly, recency-the recent occurrence of a form in the discourse.It is well known that an adjective's prosodic shape influences comparative form selection

Abstract. This study found that monolingual English speakers from Miami speak an English variety influenced by Spanish. In this study, speech from Miami English monolinguals, English monolinguals not from Miami, and early and late SpanishEnglish bilinguals were collected, and rhythm metrics (Ramus et al., 1999) were compared between groups. Surprisingly, results also suggest that Miami English monolinguals with English-speaking parents and from neighborhoods with a lower Hispanic population may be leading this change. These results support Labov's (2014) claim that children may reject features of their parent language (in this case, English) when the speech community is highly stratified.

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