The effects of language dominance switch in bilinguals: Galician new speakers' speech production and perception

Abstract

It has long been debated whether speech production and perception remain flexible in adulthood. The current study investigates the effects of language dominance switch in Galician new speakers (neofalantes) who are raised with Spanish as a primary language and learn Galician at an early age in a bilingual environment, but in adolescence, decide to switch to using Galician almost exclusively, for ideological reasons. Results showed that neofalantes pattern with Spanish-dominants in their perception and production of mid-vowel and fricative contrasts, but with Galician-dominants in their realisation of unstressed word-final vowels, a highly salient feature of Galician. These results are taken to suggest that despite early exposure to Galician, high motivation and almost exclusive Galician language use post-switch, there are limitations to what neofalantes can learn in both production and perception, but that the hybrid categories they appear to develop may function as opportunities to mark identity within a particular community.

The Effects of Home Language and Bilingualism on the Realization of Lexical Stress in Welsh and Welsh English

“…It was suggested that "the phonetic manifestation of the contrast differed as a function of linguistic experience" (Simonet, 2014, p. 36) and that socioindexical reasons may be at the core of the lack of these contrasts in the Spanish-dominant bilinguals (Simonet, 2010, p. 676). An influence of language dominance was also found in two studies of Galician mid vowels (Amengual and Chamorro, 2015;Tomé Lourido and Evans, 2018). Both found that only Galiciandominant bilinguals distinguished Galician-specific front and back mid vowel categories, while Spanish-dominant bilinguals, and in the case of Tomé Lourido and Evans (2018) also Galician new speakers, so-called neofalantes, largely merged them.…”

New speakers: Challenges and opportunities for variationist sociolinguistics

“…Indeed, in recent years, an increasing number of papers in typologically dissimilar contexts have revealed many common themes and findings. New‐speaker studies are now available on Baseldytsch (Del Percio, ), Belarusian (Woolhiser, ), Catalan (Frekko, ; Pujolar & Puigdevall, ), Cornish (Sayers, ; Sayers & Renkó‐Michelsén, ), Corsican (Jaffe, ), Francoprovençal (Bichurina, ; Kasstan, ; Kasstan & Müller, ), Galician (O'Rourke & Ramallo, ; Tomé Lourido and Evans, ; ), Giernesiei and Jèrriais (Sallabank & Marquis, ; Wilson, Johnson, & Sallabank, ), Irish (Walsh, , O'Rourke & Walsh, ), Lemko (Hornsby, ), Louisiana Creole (Mayeux, ), Manx (Ó hIfearnáin, ), Occitan (Costa, ), Scottish Gaelic (McLeod & O'Rourke, ; Nance, ; Nance et al, ), Welsh (Morris, ; Robert, ), Western Armenian (Manoukian, ), and Yiddish (Hornsby, ). Owing to the observations set out above that new speakers are frequently characterised as employing linguistic variants that differ from traditional norms, it is surprising that so few studies have made use of quantitative variationist methods to better understand the social significance of this variation, or to connect variation in production with broader questions of linguistic diffusion and change.…”

“…Using sociophonetic methods, Tomé Lourido and Evans (; ) explore speaker variation among neofalantes (‘new speakers’) of Galician in Spain. The new speakers in these studies were raised as Spanish monolinguals who acquire Galician in adulthood, later becoming bilingual, but Galician dominant.…”

“…Studies such as these clearly illustrate the potential of bridging research on new speakers with variationist sociolinguistic theory, in order to illustrate the social significance of linguistic variation in (severely) endangered‐language communities, and the parallels that can be drawn with the broader variationist work on English and other dominant languages. New speaker studies also have much to offer the variationist literature on stylisation of speech, and, on the basis of the observations made by Tomé Lourido and Evans (; ), Nance et al, , and Kasstan and Müller (), it seems possible to conceive of new speakers as agents of sociolinguistic change in variationist terms. It will next be argued that a social network analysis can offer a fruitful case study for understanding the social mechanisms that underpin this variation.…”

The role of early experience and continued language use in bilingual speech production: A study of Galician and Spanish mid vowels by Galician-Spanish bilinguals

“…/e-ɛ/ and /o-ɔ/ (Regueira, 1996), while Spanish only distinguishes a single mid front and mid back vowel. Previous work from Galician and other Romance languages, has shown that these contrasts are particularly difficult to acquire and maintain (Amengual, 2016;Amengual & Chamorro, 2015;Mora, Keidel & Flege, 2015;Mora & Nadeu, 2012;Nadeu & Renwick, 2016;Pallier, Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 1997;Renwick & Ladd, 2016;Renwick & Nadeu, 2018;Tomé Lourido & Evans, 2015Simonet, 2011). This instability has not only been documented in bilingual settings where acquisition and maintenance may be adversely affected by interaction with a language that lacks mid vowel contrasts, as in the case of Galician and Catalan, but also in monolingual settings.…”