This study contributes to the limited research on gender agreement processing of complex syntacti... more This study contributes to the limited research on gender agreement processing of complex syntactic structures in the auditory modality. By examining learners at varying stages of second language (L2) development, we aim to identify the linguistic factors that facilitate this process. First language English – second language Spanish learners listened to temporarily ambiguous Spanish sentences containing relative clauses. In each case, the ambiguity could be resolved through gender agreement between an adjective and one of two competing nouns with gender mismatches. We assessed participant accuracy through aural comprehension questions. Our findings indicate that determiners and proficiency impact learners’ accuracy in the task. Specifically, they highlight the role of determiners in gender agreement processing in the absence of duplications as well as the impact of proficiency on the processing of noun endings with marked feminine gender. Additionally, we identify a pattern of increased accuracy in gender agreement processing in high attachment cases. We argue that this pattern challenges first language (L1) transfer assumptions and provides evidence of a ‘good enough’ processing strategy. This strategy relies on syntactic hierarchy and emerges as a response to complex task demands.
This study investigates the semantic status of Spanish Negative Concord Items (NCIs) through thei... more This study investigates the semantic status of Spanish Negative Concord Items (NCIs) through their comparison with English Negative Quantifiers (NQs) and Polarity Items (PIs) in acceptability judgment tasks conducted among native speakers of Spanish and English. NCIs exhibit a dual behavior depending on their syntactic context, which has resulted in various analyses that categorize them as NQs, PIs, or non-negative indefinites. The findings from this investigation provide experimental confirmation that Spanish NCIs behave like strict Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) or indefinites that are exclusively licensed by a syntactically local anti-veridical operator (i.e., negation). This experimental approach sheds light on the longstanding controversy surrounding the semantic characterization of Spanish NCIs and contributes to our understanding of their behaviour across a wide array of linguistic contexts.
The use of uptalk or a question intonation at the end of a statement is a phenomenon that has bee... more The use of uptalk or a question intonation at the end of a statement is a phenomenon that has been widely studied by linguists and gender scholars for English. However, little to no research has focused on studying this phenomenon in Spanish. By examining the discourse of the contestants of a well-known Spanish dating reality show, this study fills this gap in the research by demonstrating the existence of uptalk in Spanish. I also propose that the melodies that are associated with Spanish uptalk in the data are L* L-H% and L+H* HH%. Additionally, all of the participants that were analyzed used uptalk regardless of their gender. Nonetheless, females were the ones that use it more profusely. The use of uptalk in Spanish, like in English, served a number of discourse functions like holding the floor, showing camaraderie or softening a command. A new discourse function was also found in the data: females used uptalk for flirting during romantic interactions, a pattern that was not obse...
Auditory Processing of Gender Agreement across Relative Clauses by Spanish Heritage Speakers, 2021
Processing research on Spanish gender agreement has focused on L2 learners’ and—to a lesser exten... more Processing research on Spanish gender agreement has focused on L2 learners’ and—to a lesser extent—heritage speakers’ sensitivity to gender agreement violations. This research has been mostly carried out in the written modality, which places heritage speakers at a disadvantage as they are more frequently exposed to Spanish auditorily. This study contributes to the understanding of the differences between heritage and L2 grammars by examining the processing of gender agreement in the auditory modality and its impact on comprehension. Twenty Spanish heritage speakers and 20 intermediate L2 learners listened to stimuli containing two nouns with gender mismatches in the main clause, and an adjective in the relative clause that only agreed in gender with one of the nouns. We measured noun-adjective agreement accuracy through participants’ responses to an auditory task. Our results show that heritage speakers are more accurate than L2 learners in the auditory processing of gender agreement information for comprehension. Additionally, heritage speakers’ accuracy is modulated by their Spanish language proficiency and age of onset. Participants also exhibit higher accuracies in cases in which the adjective agrees with the first noun. We argue that this is an ambiguity resolution strategy influenced by the experimental task.
In this chapter, I argue against the view that Basque complementizers occupy the head of FinP in ... more In this chapter, I argue against the view that Basque complementizers occupy the head of FinP in the left periphery (cf. Ortiz de Urbina, 1999; Artiagoitia and Elordieta, 2016). Based on bilinguals’ acceptability judgments of complement clauses in Spanish/Basque code-switching, I propose that the Basque complementizer -enik is the spell out form of the features [finite], [force] and an interpretable anti-veridical polarity feature in Force0. The complementizer -ela, on the other hand, can either spell out the features [finite] and [force] or just the feature [finite]. Furthermore, this chapter provides supporting evidence that the phenomenon of complementizer duplication in Spanish/Basque code-switching can be accounted for by assuming a single system for spelling out syntactic terminals in bilinguals.
Obliteration after Vocabulary Insertion, Jun 1, 2017
Seminal work in Distributed Morphology has posited an operation type called Obliteration (Arregi ... more Seminal work in Distributed Morphology has posited an operation type called Obliteration (Arregi & Nevins, 2006), which deletes a terminal node from a structure. Obliteration is assumed to take place before Vocabulary Insertion (VI). Based on bilinguals' acceptability judgments of negative sentences in Basque-Spanish code-switching, we argue that Obliteration can apply to a vocabulary item that has already undergone VI.
The use of uptalk or a question intonation at the end of a statement is a phenomenon that has bee... more The use of uptalk or a question intonation at the end of a statement is a phenomenon that has been widely studied by linguists and gender scholars for English. However, little to no research has focused on studying this phenomenon in Spanish. By examining the discourse of the contestants of a well-known Spanish dating reality show, this study fills this gap in the research by demonstrating the existence of uptalk in Spanish. I also propose that the melodies that are associated with Spanish uptalk in the data are L* L-H% and L+H* HH%. Additionally, all of the participants that were analyzed used uptalk regardless of their gender. Nonetheless, females were the ones that use it more profusely. The use of uptalk in Spanish, like in English, served a number of discourse functions like holding the floor, showing camaraderie or softening a command. A new discourse function was also found in the data: females used uptalk for flirting during romantic interactions, a pattern that was not observed at all for men.
This presentation provides empirical evidence that Negative Concord licensing is syntactic and su... more This presentation provides empirical evidence that Negative Concord licensing is syntactic and subject to locality conditions based on experimental data drawn from sentences containing cases of Negative Concord licensing across complement, adjunct and complex-NP clauses in Spanish. Based on the data, I provide an analysis of this phenomenon in complement clauses based on Bobaljik & Wurmbrand's (2013) Domain Suspension. The crucial idea is that merging a verb that selects for a subjunctive complement involves a featural dependency. This particular dependency, spans the domain boundary and suspends the phasehood of the complement. This explains why NC licensing is allowed across subjunctive complements.
This study contributes to the limited research on gender agreement processing of complex syntacti... more This study contributes to the limited research on gender agreement processing of complex syntactic structures in the auditory modality. By examining learners at varying stages of second language (L2) development, we aim to identify the linguistic factors that facilitate this process. First language English – second language Spanish learners listened to temporarily ambiguous Spanish sentences containing relative clauses. In each case, the ambiguity could be resolved through gender agreement between an adjective and one of two competing nouns with gender mismatches. We assessed participant accuracy through aural comprehension questions. Our findings indicate that determiners and proficiency impact learners’ accuracy in the task. Specifically, they highlight the role of determiners in gender agreement processing in the absence of duplications as well as the impact of proficiency on the processing of noun endings with marked feminine gender. Additionally, we identify a pattern of increased accuracy in gender agreement processing in high attachment cases. We argue that this pattern challenges first language (L1) transfer assumptions and provides evidence of a ‘good enough’ processing strategy. This strategy relies on syntactic hierarchy and emerges as a response to complex task demands.
This study investigates the semantic status of Spanish Negative Concord Items (NCIs) through thei... more This study investigates the semantic status of Spanish Negative Concord Items (NCIs) through their comparison with English Negative Quantifiers (NQs) and Polarity Items (PIs) in acceptability judgment tasks conducted among native speakers of Spanish and English. NCIs exhibit a dual behavior depending on their syntactic context, which has resulted in various analyses that categorize them as NQs, PIs, or non-negative indefinites. The findings from this investigation provide experimental confirmation that Spanish NCIs behave like strict Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) or indefinites that are exclusively licensed by a syntactically local anti-veridical operator (i.e., negation). This experimental approach sheds light on the longstanding controversy surrounding the semantic characterization of Spanish NCIs and contributes to our understanding of their behaviour across a wide array of linguistic contexts.
The use of uptalk or a question intonation at the end of a statement is a phenomenon that has bee... more The use of uptalk or a question intonation at the end of a statement is a phenomenon that has been widely studied by linguists and gender scholars for English. However, little to no research has focused on studying this phenomenon in Spanish. By examining the discourse of the contestants of a well-known Spanish dating reality show, this study fills this gap in the research by demonstrating the existence of uptalk in Spanish. I also propose that the melodies that are associated with Spanish uptalk in the data are L* L-H% and L+H* HH%. Additionally, all of the participants that were analyzed used uptalk regardless of their gender. Nonetheless, females were the ones that use it more profusely. The use of uptalk in Spanish, like in English, served a number of discourse functions like holding the floor, showing camaraderie or softening a command. A new discourse function was also found in the data: females used uptalk for flirting during romantic interactions, a pattern that was not obse...
Auditory Processing of Gender Agreement across Relative Clauses by Spanish Heritage Speakers, 2021
Processing research on Spanish gender agreement has focused on L2 learners’ and—to a lesser exten... more Processing research on Spanish gender agreement has focused on L2 learners’ and—to a lesser extent—heritage speakers’ sensitivity to gender agreement violations. This research has been mostly carried out in the written modality, which places heritage speakers at a disadvantage as they are more frequently exposed to Spanish auditorily. This study contributes to the understanding of the differences between heritage and L2 grammars by examining the processing of gender agreement in the auditory modality and its impact on comprehension. Twenty Spanish heritage speakers and 20 intermediate L2 learners listened to stimuli containing two nouns with gender mismatches in the main clause, and an adjective in the relative clause that only agreed in gender with one of the nouns. We measured noun-adjective agreement accuracy through participants’ responses to an auditory task. Our results show that heritage speakers are more accurate than L2 learners in the auditory processing of gender agreement information for comprehension. Additionally, heritage speakers’ accuracy is modulated by their Spanish language proficiency and age of onset. Participants also exhibit higher accuracies in cases in which the adjective agrees with the first noun. We argue that this is an ambiguity resolution strategy influenced by the experimental task.
In this chapter, I argue against the view that Basque complementizers occupy the head of FinP in ... more In this chapter, I argue against the view that Basque complementizers occupy the head of FinP in the left periphery (cf. Ortiz de Urbina, 1999; Artiagoitia and Elordieta, 2016). Based on bilinguals’ acceptability judgments of complement clauses in Spanish/Basque code-switching, I propose that the Basque complementizer -enik is the spell out form of the features [finite], [force] and an interpretable anti-veridical polarity feature in Force0. The complementizer -ela, on the other hand, can either spell out the features [finite] and [force] or just the feature [finite]. Furthermore, this chapter provides supporting evidence that the phenomenon of complementizer duplication in Spanish/Basque code-switching can be accounted for by assuming a single system for spelling out syntactic terminals in bilinguals.
Obliteration after Vocabulary Insertion, Jun 1, 2017
Seminal work in Distributed Morphology has posited an operation type called Obliteration (Arregi ... more Seminal work in Distributed Morphology has posited an operation type called Obliteration (Arregi & Nevins, 2006), which deletes a terminal node from a structure. Obliteration is assumed to take place before Vocabulary Insertion (VI). Based on bilinguals' acceptability judgments of negative sentences in Basque-Spanish code-switching, we argue that Obliteration can apply to a vocabulary item that has already undergone VI.
The use of uptalk or a question intonation at the end of a statement is a phenomenon that has bee... more The use of uptalk or a question intonation at the end of a statement is a phenomenon that has been widely studied by linguists and gender scholars for English. However, little to no research has focused on studying this phenomenon in Spanish. By examining the discourse of the contestants of a well-known Spanish dating reality show, this study fills this gap in the research by demonstrating the existence of uptalk in Spanish. I also propose that the melodies that are associated with Spanish uptalk in the data are L* L-H% and L+H* HH%. Additionally, all of the participants that were analyzed used uptalk regardless of their gender. Nonetheless, females were the ones that use it more profusely. The use of uptalk in Spanish, like in English, served a number of discourse functions like holding the floor, showing camaraderie or softening a command. A new discourse function was also found in the data: females used uptalk for flirting during romantic interactions, a pattern that was not observed at all for men.
This presentation provides empirical evidence that Negative Concord licensing is syntactic and su... more This presentation provides empirical evidence that Negative Concord licensing is syntactic and subject to locality conditions based on experimental data drawn from sentences containing cases of Negative Concord licensing across complement, adjunct and complex-NP clauses in Spanish. Based on the data, I provide an analysis of this phenomenon in complement clauses based on Bobaljik & Wurmbrand's (2013) Domain Suspension. The crucial idea is that merging a verb that selects for a subjunctive complement involves a featural dependency. This particular dependency, spans the domain boundary and suspends the phasehood of the complement. This explains why NC licensing is allowed across subjunctive complements.
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studied by linguists and gender scholars for English. However, little to no research has focused on studying
this phenomenon in Spanish. By examining the discourse of the contestants of a well-known Spanish dating
reality show, this study fills this gap in the research by demonstrating the existence of uptalk in Spanish. I also
propose that the melodies that are associated with Spanish uptalk in the data are L* L-H% and L+H* HH%.
Additionally, all of the participants that were analyzed used uptalk regardless of their gender. Nonetheless,
females were the ones that use it more profusely. The use of uptalk in Spanish, like in English, served a number
of discourse functions like holding the floor, showing camaraderie or softening a command. A new discourse
function was also found in the data: females used uptalk for flirting during romantic interactions, a pattern
that was not observed at all for men.
studied by linguists and gender scholars for English. However, little to no research has focused on studying
this phenomenon in Spanish. By examining the discourse of the contestants of a well-known Spanish dating
reality show, this study fills this gap in the research by demonstrating the existence of uptalk in Spanish. I also
propose that the melodies that are associated with Spanish uptalk in the data are L* L-H% and L+H* HH%.
Additionally, all of the participants that were analyzed used uptalk regardless of their gender. Nonetheless,
females were the ones that use it more profusely. The use of uptalk in Spanish, like in English, served a number
of discourse functions like holding the floor, showing camaraderie or softening a command. A new discourse
function was also found in the data: females used uptalk for flirting during romantic interactions, a pattern
that was not observed at all for men.