Chapter 8. The sociophonetic perception of heritage Spanish speakers in the United States

Exploring the Role of Phonological Environment in Evaluating Social Meaning: The Case of /s/ Aspiration in Puerto Rican Spanish

“…Table 1, however, shows that the islander listeners have resided a notably larger portion of their life (0.97) on the island than the mainlander listeners (0.45), but future studies could consider a more nuanced conceptualization of 'residence.' Regardless, we may expect not to find differences between the two populations, in line with some studies that show similar coda /s/ production between Puerto Ricans on the island and mainland (Ghosh-Johnson 2005; O'Rourke and Potowski 2016; Erker and Reffel 2021) and the fact that sociophonetic perception is found to be similar between second-generation Mexican Americans and Mexicans (Chappell 2019b;Chappell 2021). We do find an effect of listener residence independent of /s/ realization, such that Puerto Ricans rate sentences with prevocalic /s/ as higher status than sentences with preconsonantal /s/ regardless of variant.…”

“…Crucial to our analysis is the disentangling of prescriptiveness and markedness-in Puerto Rican Spanish, it is the norm to aspirate coda /s/, so a sibilant realization ([s]), though prescriptively correct, is more marked and unexpected, particularly in preconsonantal position in men's speech, where it is especially rare. Additionally, we find no differences in the evaluations of listeners residing on the island versus those on the mainland US in regard to their perception of /s/, which adds to the growing body of evidence that sociolinguistic norms are maintained in Spanishspeaking communities in the US (Chappell 2019b(Chappell , 2021Erker and Reffel 2021). This logarithmic response was replicated by looking at the same variable and using the same paradigm for US listeners by Wagner and Hesson (2014) but not by Vaughn (2022a), who instead found a more linear effect of the proportion of alveolar tokens on speaker ratings.…”

“…This similarity in perceptions of monolingual Spanish listeners and bilingual US listeners is further supported when examining other sociolinguistic variables. In the evaluation of labiodentalized <v>, Chappell (2019b) observed that [v] was evaluated positively in women's speech and negatively in men's speech by both monolingual Mexican Spanish listeners and bilingual second-generation Mexican American listeners.…”

The Indeterminacy of Social Meaning Linked to ‘Mexico’ and ‘Texas’ Spanish: Examining Monoglossic Language Ideologies among Heritage and L2 Spanish Listeners

“…As such it is inseparable from the ideological field and can be seen as an embodiment of ideology in linguistic form" (Eckert 2008, p. 464). The multitude of social meanings 8 attached to linguistic variants has been supported by several sociolinguistic perception studies, where the manipulation of a single phonetic variant (Barnes 2015;Campbell-Kibler 2007Chappell 2016Chappell , 2018Chappell , 2019Chappell , 2020Chappell , 2021aRegan 2020Regan , 2022bRegan , 2022cWalker et al 2014;Wright 2021aWright , 2021b or of a single word (Baird et al 2018;Regan 2022a) between guises affects listeners' evaluations. Other sociolinguistic perception studies have examined the indexical fields of language varieties 9 (Callesano and Carter 2019;Carter and Callesano 2018;Chappell and Barnes 2023;Niedzielski and Preston 1999), demonstrating that speech perception research can further our understanding of the social meaning of language varieties as well.…”