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The Acquisition of a Sociolinguistic Variable While Volunteering Abroad : = S-weakening among L2 and Heritage Speakers in Coastal Ecuador.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	The Acquisition of a Sociolinguistic Variable While Volunteering Abroad :/
Reminder of title:	S-weakening among L2 and Heritage Speakers in Coastal Ecuador.
Author:	Escalante, Chelsea.
Description:	1 online resource (181 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 80-01(E), Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International80-01A(E).
Subject:	Linguistics. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9780438291324

The Acquisition of a Sociolinguistic Variable While Volunteering Abroad : = S-weakening among L2 and Heritage Speakers in Coastal Ecuador.
Escalante, Chelsea.

The Acquisition of a Sociolinguistic Variable While Volunteering Abroad :S-weakening among L2 and Heritage Speakers in Coastal Ecuador. - 1 online resource (181 pages)

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 80-01(E), Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Davis, 2018.

Includes bibliographical references

This dissertation lies at the intersection of second language acquisition (SLA) and sociophonetic variation. Specifically, it investigates the perception and production of /s/-weakening, a dialectal feature characteristic of Guayaquileno (coastal Ecuadorian) Spanish, within a specific community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Eckert, 2006) -- a group of 14 young-adult English speakers who travel to Ecuador as humanitarian volunteers for a period of one year. It seeks to understand how, why, and to what extent these speakers may accommodate their speech to match local norms in terms of /s/-aspiration. Because /s/-lenition has been a topic of wide scholarship in the field of Hispanic sociolinguistics, several trends have been solidly established by previous research; the general consensus of the field is that the weakened variants of /s/ are often associated with speakers of lower socioeconomic status, found at higher rates in the vernacular, and more readily produced when followed by a consonant (Terrell, 1979; Lipski, 1999; File-Muriel, 2007). Yet despite the fact that much attention has been paid to /s/-weakening among native speakers (NSs), there are large gaps in the literature regarding how second language speakers perceive, process, and produce this stigmatized variant. On the perception side, it remains unclear as to how speakers acquire the ability to map [h] to /s/ and how that mapping is affected by factors including proficiency level, exposure to the variant, following phonological context, and individual differences. On the production side, previous research has thus far been unable to demonstrate how and to what extent L2 speakers acquire native-like patterns in /s/-aspiration and how the factors that constrain the variable among NSs differ from those that constrain it among language learners.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2018

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9780438291324Subjects--Topical Terms:

557829
Linguistics.
Index Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

The Acquisition of a Sociolinguistic Variable While Volunteering Abroad : = S-weakening among L2 and Heritage Speakers in Coastal Ecuador.
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245 1 4 $a The Acquisition of a Sociolinguistic Variable While Volunteering Abroad : $b S-weakening among L2 and Heritage Speakers in Coastal Ecuador.
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500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 80-01(E), Section: A.
500 $a Advisers: Robert Bayley; Travis Bradley.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Davis, 2018.
504 $a Includes bibliographical references
520 $a This dissertation lies at the intersection of second language acquisition (SLA) and sociophonetic variation. Specifically, it investigates the perception and production of /s/-weakening, a dialectal feature characteristic of Guayaquileno (coastal Ecuadorian) Spanish, within a specific community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Eckert, 2006) -- a group of 14 young-adult English speakers who travel to Ecuador as humanitarian volunteers for a period of one year. It seeks to understand how, why, and to what extent these speakers may accommodate their speech to match local norms in terms of /s/-aspiration. Because /s/-lenition has been a topic of wide scholarship in the field of Hispanic sociolinguistics, several trends have been solidly established by previous research; the general consensus of the field is that the weakened variants of /s/ are often associated with speakers of lower socioeconomic status, found at higher rates in the vernacular, and more readily produced when followed by a consonant (Terrell, 1979; Lipski, 1999; File-Muriel, 2007). Yet despite the fact that much attention has been paid to /s/-weakening among native speakers (NSs), there are large gaps in the literature regarding how second language speakers perceive, process, and produce this stigmatized variant. On the perception side, it remains unclear as to how speakers acquire the ability to map [h] to /s/ and how that mapping is affected by factors including proficiency level, exposure to the variant, following phonological context, and individual differences. On the production side, previous research has thus far been unable to demonstrate how and to what extent L2 speakers acquire native-like patterns in /s/-aspiration and how the factors that constrain the variable among NSs differ from those that constrain it among language learners.
520 $a Using a mixed-methods approach, this study addresses several gaps in the field by examining how adult speakers (ages 22-26) -- eleven second language learners (L2s) and three heritage speakers (HSs) -- who arrive in Ecuador with varying levels of Spanish proficiency and international experience, perceive and produce syllable-final /s/ and how their patterns change over the duration of their stay in the country. Quantitative data was gathered at six different intervals throughout the participants' volunteer year via sociolinguistic interviews and perception tasks and later submitted to Rbrul for multivariate analysis. Qualitative information was gathered through questionnaires and pre- and post-interviews and used to inform case-studies of the three HSs who demonstrated significant inter- as well as intra-group differences in perception and production.
520 $a On the perception side, results indicate that nearly all participants made significant gains in their ability to perceive a weakened variant of /s/ over time, with the strongest gains evidenced within the first two months in-country. These results imply that it is possible for language learners to remap their phonological system -- a valuable ability given the widespread variability of /s/ and the fact that leaners will likely encounter such variation in their acquisitional journey. The analysis determined phonological context to be a significant predictor of the ability to perceive weakened variants, with preconsonantal /s/ being perceived to a greater degree than prevocalic or prepausal /s/. In general, the ability to perceive weakened variants as /s/ was found to be correlated to L2 proficiency level, with highly proficient speakers perceiving aspirated variants to a greater degree than low proficiency speakers. However, there was a glaring exception to this trend for two HSs of non-aspirating home dialects who, despite their high proficiency levels, perceived aspiration at a level similar to the least proficient L2 speakers.
520 $a On the production side, /s/-weakening was extremely limited. Of the 2,399 tokens collected over the course of the year, only 112 (4.6%) of them were weakened and the majority of the weakened tokens (74.1%) were produced by one participant. Only 29 tokens of weakened /s/ (1.2% of the total number of tokens) were produced by all of the other participants combined. Among all participants, following phonological context was found to be a significant predictor of both duration and COG, with pre-consonantal /s/ favoring lenition more than pre-vocalic or pre-pausal contexts. Individual as a random variable was also found to be significant, emphasizing the complexity of the language learning experience in the acquisition of dialectal variation. An important insignificant factor group in the production analysis was exposure, meaning that as time went on, participants' acoustic measurements of /s/ in neither temporal nor spectral terms moved toward /s/-reduction. This suggests that gains in perception are not necessarily reflective of gains in production and that learners can still show evidence of gains in sociolinguistic competence even if they do not produce the local variables. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).
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