Bilingual language dominance and contrastive focus marking: Gradient effects of K’ichee’ syntax on Spanish prosody

Abstract

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:

This study examines prosodic contrastive focus marking in the Spanish of 24 simultaneous K’ichee’-Spanish bilinguals via the following research questions: (1) How do K’ichee’-Spanish bilinguals prosodically mark contrastive focus in Spanish? (2) Is there evidence of K’ichee’ influence in Spanish prosody and is this possible K’ichee’ influence correlated with the language dominance of the bilinguals?

Design/methodology/approach:

Participants produced utterances in both broad and contrastive focus conditions via a question-answer task.

Data and analysis:

Tonic syllables of 1638 target words were analyzed according to L- and H-tone alignment and the rise of the pitch contour. Data were analyzed via linear mixed-effects models according to pragmatic condition (categorical effect) and language dominance (continuous effect).

Findings/conclusions:

Results indicate gradient effects of language dominance of possible K’ichee’ influence. Spanish-dominant bilinguals tend to prosodically mark contrastive focus to a greater degree than K’ichee’-dominant bilinguals. It is proposed that this may be due to the different focus marking strategies between K’ichee’ and Spanish. K’ichee’ primarily marks contrastive focus syntactically whereas it is much more common in Spanish to only mark contrastive focus prosodically.

Originality:

This study employs a modified version of the question-answer task, which uses video clips to elicit the data in order to include participants with low literacy rates and control the elicitations. It also provides one of the first analyses of intonation in Guatemalan Spanish and the task and data allow for direct comparisons with the K’ichee’ data produced by these same bilinguals.

Significance/implications:

These results parallel those of similar studies: among bilinguals, the syntactic contrastive focus marking strategy of one language may affect the prosodic contrastive focus marking strategy of their other language. Additionally, the use of language dominance as a continuous variable expands our understanding of inter-speaker variation in such studies.