Cross-generational Prosodic Convergence in South Texas Spanish

Spanish in Context 13:1 (2016), !"–#!. doi 10.1075/sic.13.1.02carissn 1571–0718 / e-issn 1571–0726 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Cross-generational prosodic convergence in South Texas Spanish

Phillip M. Carter and Tonya Wolford

/is study investigates variation in the prosodic system of Spanish in the speech of three generations of Mexican Americans living in a Mexican American-majority community in South Texas, United States, characterized by high levels of bilingualism and long-term, sustained contact between languages. Low and Grabe’s (1995) Pairwise Variability Index was used to quantify prosodic rhythm in the Spanish and the English of community members across generations in order to: (1) assess di0erences between contact and non-contact varieties of Spanish, (2) investigate the cross-generational stability of prosodic rhythm in the community, and (3) ascertain the type of in1uence from English, if any, on Spanish prosody. Findings show that while the oldest generations maintain separate systems of rhythm in Spanish and English, the youngest generation demonstrates prosodic convergence.

Keywords: Spanish / English contact, prosodic rhythm, linguistic convergence

$. Introduction

/e cross-generational shi2 from Spanish to English in U.S. Latino communi-ties is an empirical reality that has been demonstrated many times over, not only by sociolinguists (e.g., Otheguy, García, and Roca 2000, Veltman 1988, Zentella 1997) but also by demographers, linguistic anthropologists and others interested in the dynamics of socio-demographic change as it pertains to language. /e so-ciolinguistic literature on this topic is now quite robust, and demonstrates that the attrition of Spanish, or “incomplete acquisition” (Silva-Corvalán 2003, 2006) in the United States is not limited to speci3c geographical areas or national-origin groups. Indeed, the cross-generational discontinuity (Lynch 2013) of Spanish has been documented in diverse regional and ethnic communities throughout the U.S., including within the largely Mexican American community in Los Angeles (Silva-Corvalán 1986, 1994, 2003, 2006), the Puerto Rican community of New York City

%& Phillip M. Carter and Tonya Wolford

(Zentella 1997), and the Cuban population in Miami (Solé 1979; Otheguy, García, and Roca 2000; Porcel 2006). /is pattern should be no surprise given U.S. im-migrant history, in which immigrant languages ranging from German to Japanese have systematically been lost by the second or, in the best of cases, third genera-tion (Veltman 2000). /e most recent work to address this matter (Otheguy and Zentella 2011, 5) shows that in New York City, where Spanish use is socially quite robust, “there is every indication that the present-day vitality of Spanish… lasts for only two generations in most families.” Moreover, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have documented myriad formal and informal pressures against Spanish in the United States that collectively contribute to cross-generational loss, including prohibition of speaking Spanish in school and in the workplace and popular narratives that 3gure Spanish negatively (e.g. Barrett 2006, Hill 2008, Santa Ana 2002, Urciuoli 1996, Zentella 1997).

/e situation of language shi2 involving Spanish in the United States raises important questions for sociolinguists, who have long been interested in docu-menting and understanding the motivation for structural changes taking place to Spanish in bilingual communities. While sustained contact with English does seem to bear some in1uence, the literature is very clear that not all changes to attrited varieties of Spanish can be attributed to the so-called direct ‘in1uence’ of English. However, the disciplinary conversation about the role of English on Spanish in the United States has developed almost exclusively on the basis of the analysis of Spanish grammar, leaving phonetic and phonological variation remarkably un-derstudied. In this paper, we are not interested in making broad claims about the role of English on Spanish in the United States as such, but rather hope to broaden the scope of the conversation through the analysis of an understudied phonetic variable in an understudied sociodemographic context. Speci3cally, we present here the results of a quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of prosodic rhythm, or the suprasegmental patterns of timing of spoken language, in the speech of three gen-erations of Mexican Americans in an historically bilingual community in South Texas. We refer to the town here as “Las Alas.”

At the time that data were collected for this study, which took place over three years in the mid-2000s, Las Alas was a Mexican American-majority town com-prised of approximately 7,500 residents. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 84% of the Las Alas population was Hispanic or Latino. An important sociological aspect of this 3eld site is that, despite its close proximity to the Mexico border, there is very little new immigration from Mexico; all but 5% of Las Alas residents were born in the United States.1 /is fact makes Las Alas somewhat unique in

$. Some community residents commented that they had family ties in northern Mexico, and several older residents reported driving to Monterrey, Mexico to go shopping.

Cross-generational prosodic convergence in South Texas Spanish %$

the context of cross-generational sociolinguistic studies of Spanish in the United States, which have tended to be conducted in cities with ongoing immigration from Latin America. For example, studies set in Los Angeles (Silva-Corvalán 1986, 1994), Houston (Gutiérrez 1995, 2001), New York City (Otheguy and Zentella 2011; Zentella 1997) and Miami (Lynch 2000) have all commented on the role that new immigration from Spanish-speaking countries plays on the maintenance of Spanish in the U.S. setting, a phenomenon that Silva-Corvalán (1994) has char-acterized as ‘cyclical bilingualism’ and Lynch (2000) has termed ‘recontact.’ Las Alas is noteworthy in that there is very little recontact with Spanish due to new immigration. At the same time, cross-generational language shi2 from Spanish to English in the community is undeniable. /e oldest speakers interviewed (gen-eration 1) are Spanish monolinguals, while the youngest speakers interviewed (generation 3) show a clear preference for English. We provide a more complete description of the 3eld site and study participants in Section 2 of the paper.

In the context of Las Alas’ relative insularity, we pose three sets of questions about the prosodic rhythm of Spanish spoken in the community. /ese questions are motivated by three of the top areas of theoretical concern for sociolinguists working with Spanish variation and change in the United States: (1) structural variation in varieties of Spanish in the U.S. and structural similarities with non-contact varieties, (2) structural stability across time, and (3) the type of in1uence English plays, if any, on both of these. We have thus formulated the following ques-tions about prosodic rhythm in Las Alas Spanish:

1. Is the contact variety of Spanish observed in Las Alas rhythmically di0erent from monolingual, non-contact varieties?

2. How stable is the prosodic rhythm of Spanish across generations in light of patterns of Spanish/English language shi2 and Spanish attrition over time in the community? Given what we know about the instability of Spanish gram-mar in bilingual communities in the U.S., do we expect Spanish prosody to be equally susceptible to change over time?

3. If Spanish prosody is empirically di0erent from non-contact varieties, what is the source and nature of the di0erence? Does putative prosodic di0erence owe to the situation of sustained contact with English in the community? If so, can the in1uence of English prosody be described as ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’?

%! Phillip M. Carter and Tonya Wolford

!. Background

!.$ /e Community: ‘Las Alas’

Las Alas is a majority Mexican-American community located in the South Texas Plains region of Texas, roughly halfway between San Antonio and the U.S.-Mexico border. Due to the relatively small size of the town, and because of the sensitive nature of the language politics discussed in many of the recorded 3eld interviews we collected, we have decided to use a pseudonym to refer to the town as a way of further protecting the identities of participants.

At the end of the nineteenth-century, Las Alas was an all-Anglo White farming town, but within a few decades of 3nishing the Great Northern Railway in 1880, Mexican Americans began arriving to take advantage of the jobs created by the railroad. A system of racial segregation was elaborated, including in schools, such that Anglo Whites lived on the east side of the railroad and Mexican Americans on the west. In Mexican Schools, Spanish was strictly prohibited and as result the old-est generation did not learn to read in Spanish. Schools were desegregated in the 1960s, and a2er many years of protest, dual-language programs were established in 1993.

Language shi2 from Spanish to English in undeniable in the community and this was evident in the structure of our 3eld recordings, in which the oldest speak-ers demonstrated a clear preference for Spanish while the youngest speakers clear-ly preferred speaking English. Nevertheless, it is untenable to suggest that Spanish is disappearing at the level of the speech community. Written Spanish is ubiq-uitous in signage around town, not only in taquerías and locally-owned tiendas frequented by Mexican Americans, but also in large discount stores, fast-food res-taurants, and banks. /e pews at a local Catholic church were 3lled end-to-end for a Mother’s Day Mass, which was conducted only in Spanish. In the private homes where we conducted 3eldwork, we observed several generations of Las Alas resi-dents gathering around the television to watch Spanish language telenovelas. In the family situations observed, Spanish/English code-mixing was the norm for adults of all ages across the generational groups, except for when speaking with the oldest residents of the 3rst generation, in which case Spanish was the only language used.

As reported in Wolford and Carter (2010, 120), the Spanish in the second and third generation of Las Alas is characterized by commonly reported changes in the lexical and morphosyntactic system, including, especially, loss of gender agreement between noun morphology and corresponding de3nite and inde3nite articles. Constructions such as un buena alumno for un buen alumno and los mae-stras for las maestras, are common. Simple English-based calques (e.g. Sp — cu-itió la escuala Eng — He quit school; Sp — buenos grados; Eng — good grades)

Cross-generational prosodic convergence in South Texas Spanish %%

and loanwords resulting in mixed constructions (e.g. la swimming pool) were also common.

!.! Putative in1uence of English on varieties of Spanish in the U.S.

Debate about the nature of English in1uence on Spanish in the U.S. has tended to focus on whether this in1uence can be said to be ‘direct’ or ‘indirect.’ Silva-Corvalán (1986, 1994) has argued that English in1uence on Spanish in the U.S. is mostly indirect, and that sustained contact with English serves to accelerate pro-cesses of change already inherent in monolingual varieties. Her conclusion was based on a multi-generational study of Spanish in the Mexican-origin population of East Los Angeles. In contrast, Otheguy and Zentella (2011) have argued that the in1uence of English on Spanish in New York City is more direct in nature as it pertains to patterns of subject pronoun use.

Our objective is not to recapitulate this debate here, but to point out that the overwhelming majority of the work animating this debate has focused on gram-matical structures,2 leaving the phonological and suprasegmental systems of con-tact varieties of Spanish in the United States relatively understudied. /e asym-metry in interest between grammatical structures and phonetic/phonological ones is noteworthy, given that scholars interested in the development of English in U.S. Latino communities have focused their attention almost entirely on phonol-ogy, with very little debate (e.g. e.g. Fought 2003; Godinez and Maddieson 1985; Pen3eld and Ornstein-Galicia 1985; /omas 2001; Santa Ana 1992, 1993; and Wolfram, Carter, and Moriello 2004). /e dearth of scholarly interest in English in1uence on Spanish phonology is also surprising, given that the broader litera-ture on language contact is replete with examples of contact-based phonologi-cal transfer, or to use Bullock and Toribio’s (2004) term, ‘convergence.’ Indeed, /omason (2001, 11) has noted that, “all aspects of language structure are subject to transfer from one language to another, given the right mix of social and linguis-tic circumstances.”

While some studies have investigated phonological aspects of varieties of Spanish spoken in the U.S. (e.g. Ma and Herasimchuk 1971; Terrell 1979; Alfaraz 2000), few have explicitly addressed the role of English, though there are some notable exceptions. Lynch (2009) provides a detailed analysis of [s] retention, as-piration, and deletion in the speech of Miami Cubans, whom he divides into two groups: Cuban-born, early exile speakers who immigrated to Miami as adults, and English-dominant, young Miami-born speakers of the third generation. /ough

!. /e literature (e.g. Silva-Corvalán 1986, 1994) technically describes the extension of estar as a semantic change with grammatical consequences.

%' Phillip M. Carter and Tonya Wolford

diachronic studies of Cuban Spanish have indicated increase in aspiration and de-letion over time, Lynch’s study reports that this change appears to be reversed in Miami, where some Miami-born speakers use the sibilant form [s] twice as much as their grandparents’ generation (cf. La0ord 1986). Lynch hypothesized that this 3nding might be the result of cross-linguistic transfer, given that English categori-cally manifests [s] with no aspiration or deletion. However, he also noted that the increased frequency of 3nal [s] occurs at the expense of the aspirant [h] among Miami-born speakers, who continue to delete [s] at roughly the same rates as old-er, 3rst-generation speakers. /us, the precise role of English in the reversal of this change-in-progress in Cuban Spanish is le2 in uncertain terms in bilingual Miami.

Alvord’s (2010) study addressing intonation in Miami Cuban Spanish is one of the few studies to address non-segmental phonological features of U.S. Spanish. He identi3ed two intonational structures that index absolute interrogative mean-ing in the speech of Miami-born Cuban Americans. /e 3rst of these, a falling-style pattern, is associated with Cuban and other Caribbean varieties of Spanish and therefore unexpected among this population. /e second, a rising pattern, is unattested in Cuban Spanish, but is prevalent in North American English, leading Alvord to suggest that the second pattern indicates contact-induced innovation in the suprasegemantal system of contact Spanish.

Finally, Phillips’ (1982) study of the distribution of [b], [ß], and [v] in Los Angeles Spanish indicates that younger speakers and those speakers of any age who speak English more than Spanish have signi3cantly greater frequencies of [v] than older speakers and those who speak Spanish more than English.

!.% Prosodic rhythm

In traditional accounts of prosodic rhythm (e.g. Pike 1945, Abercrombie 1967), Spanish and English have been said to exhibit di0erent rhythmic patterns. Spanish is described as being ‘syllable-timed,’ characteristic of languages in the Italic (i.e. Romance) branch of Indo-European, while English is described as being ‘stress-timed,’ characteristic of languages in the Germanic branch of Indo-European. According to this system of classi3cation, ‘syllable-timed’ languages are thought to be those in which syllables are of equal or nearly equal duration and recur at regular intervals. In contrast, ‘stress-timed’ languages are thought to be those in which syllables are of varying durations and recur at irregular temporal intervals.

Research on speech rhythm has centered on two closely related questions. First, to what extent are rhythmic systems actually dichotomous? /at is, are the terms ‘stress-timing’ and ‘syllable-timing’ best thought of as heuristics that point to a range of prosodic patterns, or do they in fact point to discrete prosodic cat-egories? Second, to what extent is prosodic rhythm a suprasegmental system unto

Cross-generational prosodic convergence in South Texas Spanish %#

itself, independent of a language’s segmental phonology, or is prosodic rhythm instead an epiphenomenon of a language’s phonological segments? Phoneticians, phonologists, and sociolinguists working with diverse languages from a variety of language families have shed light on both of these questions. Work by Ramus, Nespor, and Mehler (1999) indicates that not all languages fall neatly into the stress/syllable-timing binary, as languages such as Catalan and Polish exhibit syl-lable structures prototypical of one rhythmic system or the other, yet demonstrate segmental phenomena such as vowel reduction more commonly associated with the opposite system. With respect to Spanish in particular, a number of studies have found phonological characteristics that are inconsistent with syllable-timing. For example, in an in1uential study of prosodic rhythm, Borzone de Manrique and Signorini (1983) found unequal syllable durations in Spanish, which is un-expected for syllable-timed languages. A number of phonetic and phonological motivations have been shown to explain unequal syllable duration in Spanish, including pre-pausal contexts (Ríos 1991), coda-position consonant lengthening (Campbell and Isard 1991), and, for a limited set of consonants, lexical stress (Del Barrio Estévez and Tornel Castells 1999).

Prior to the 1990s prosodic rhythm was considered notoriously di4cult to measure and quantify, but the past 32een years have witnessed an upsurge in in-terest in prosody, in part due to a technique introduced by Low and Grabe in 1995. /is technique, the Pairwise Variability Index (henceforth ‘PVI’), provides a means of quantifying rhythm directly. An advantage of the method is that com-paring the duration of adjacent vocalic segments controls for the overall speaking rate. /e details of the method as applied in this study are explained in Section 3.2 below.3

Since the introduction of the PVI method, numerous studies have investigat-ed the prosodic rhythm of numerous language varieties, including Spanish and English. /e question that has motivated the overwhelming majority of work in this area has to do with substrate e0ects and language transfer in contact situa-tions. For example, Low, Grabe, and Nolan (2000) showed that Singapore English was signi3cantly more syllable-timed than varieties of English in the U.K. Szakay (2006) found that Maori English is signi3cantly more syllable-timed than Pakeha English, the variety used by speakers of European descent. Cogshall (2008) ob-served that the variety of Cherokee English spoken in the Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina is signi3cantly more syllable-timed than the variety of speakers of European descent in the same region. Recent work in second lan-guage acquisition by Gabriel and Kireva (2014) lends support for the hypothesis

%. Readers interested in an overview of methods for quantifying prosodic rhythm should see /omas and Carter (2006).

%( Phillip M. Carter and Tonya Wolford

that prosodic rhythm is susceptible to cross-linguistic in1uence in situations of language contact. /ey compared the prosodic rhythm of Italian to that of two other groups: Italian L2 learners of Castilian Spanish and L1 speakers of Porteño Spanish, an Argentine variety thought to have been historically in1uenced by Italian. /ey report high nPVI scores for both groups, suggesting Italian in1uence both historically and in the speech of Italian learners of Spanish.

Two recent studies have measured prosodic rhythm using PVI for Spanish / English bilinguals who were asked to read passages in both languages. Robles-Puente (2014) conducted a study of prosodic rhythm among Mexican American and Mexican immigrant residents of Los Angeles, who were recorded reading a passage in Spanish and English. Participants were divided into 3ve groups: English monolinguals, adult early bilinguals, Los Angeles-born bilinguals, adult late bilin-guals, and Spanish monolinguals. Robles-Puente shows that the English monolin-guals and adult early bilinguals produce English-like rhythm in both languages, while the adult late bilinguals and the Spanish monolinguals produced Spanish-like rhythm in both languages. In contrast to these groups, the Los Angeles-born bilinguals accommodate the rhythm of the language in which they are reading. Henriksen’s (2013) study of L1 Spanish speakers learning English shows that lan-guage learners demonstrate an intermediate pattern of prosodic rhythm. /is provides further evidence that substrate in1uence on the prosody in immigrant speech communities takes place with L2 learners.

Several studies of rhythm in U.S. Latino communities conducted by socio-linguists using naturalistic speech data are especially important for the work dis-cussed here. First, Fought and Fought (2002) compared the English of Chicanos living in California with the English of Anglo Whites in the adjacent California community. /ey found more syllable timing for the Chicanos than for the Anglo Whites, though syllable timing was concentrated only within the 3rst 3ve syl-lables of an utterance. Likewise, they found a similar concentration of syllable timing in Mexican Spanish, indicating a possible link between Mexican Spanish and California Chicano English. Similarly, Carter (2005) found that the speech of Mexican Americans in North Carolina is signi3cantly more syllable-timed than the speech of non-Hispanics, though this pattern was not limited to a particular loca-tion in the utterance, as in Fought and Fought (2002). Very recently, Shousterman (2013) has shown that Puerto Rican women in Spanish Harlem are maintaining syllable-timed rhythm when speaking English, though younger speakers exhibit a wider range of PVI scores than older speakers.

Figure 1, taken from Carter (2005), shows the PVI scores for three groups of speakers: African Americans, Anglo Whites, and Latinos speaking both Spanish and English. Higher scores on the y-axis indicate more stress-timing.

Cross-generational prosodic convergence in South Texas Spanish %)

Af AmEng

Eu AmEng

HispEng

Figure 1. PVI Scores for Latinos speaking Spanish and English, Carter (2005)

Two important 3ndings are evident. First, the rhythm of Spanish is clearly dif-ferent from the rhythm of the English of the non-Latino speakers, as is expected given prior typological descriptions of these languages. Second, the English of the Latino group falls in between the production of Spanish and the production of English by non-Latinos. /is suggests that the prosodic rhythm of English in the community bears the structural in1uence of Spanish, either directly at the supra-segmental level or indirectly through lexical stress and phonological processes such as vowel reduction at the segmental level.

A robust literature now indicates that in cases of new dialect formation re-sulting from sustained language contact, it is very o2en the case that emerging linguistic varieties demonstrate prosodic in1uence from the contact language. /e current study works within this tradition, but with an eye toward understanding Spanish prosodic rhythm in a speech community characterized by close and sus-tained contact with English for several generations.

%. Methods

%.$ Field methods

Data collection took place over a period of three years in the mid-2000s by a team of trained 3eldworkers from the North Carolina Language and Life Project (NCLLP). /e 3rst language of the 3eldworkers was English, though all 3eldwork-ers were also near-native speakers of Spanish. Traditional sociolinguistic interviews were conducted Las Alas residents from three generations, the oldest of which was born in 1915 and the youngest around in the early 1990s. We used the ‘snowball method’ (Oliver 2006) of participant recruitment common in sociolinguistic com-munity studies, in which our initial contact introduced us to friends and fam-ily, who in turn introduced us to their friends and family, and so on. Although

%* Phillip M. Carter and Tonya Wolford

speakers were told they could use the language they preferred with bilingual in-terviewers, we tried to conduct separate interviews in Spanish and English with each participant, which was necessary not only for eliciting the language features we wanted to study in Spanish, but also the analysis of prosodic rhythm, which requires extended speech in one language. Speakers were interviewed individually rather than in pairs or groups in order to facilitate the spectrographic analysis of prosodic rhythm. A number of the third generation speakers stated that they did not feel comfortable speaking Spanish and were thus interviewed only in English, while still others agreed to start a Spanish-language interview, but transitioned into English a few minutes into the conversation. /is is likely due to either (a) the passive bilingualism of the speakers in the 3rd generation, or (b) the fact that extended monolingual conversations in Spanish are unequivocally not the norm for the young speakers, who clearly prefer code-mixing or English for conversa-tion.4 In all, we interviewed 12 speakers in Spanish, four from each of the three age groups, and 15 speakers in English, six from the oldest age group, four from the middle age group, and 3ve from the youngest age group. All speakers are from Las Alas, except some speakers in the oldest age group who came from Mexico as very young children.

A small, previously recorded corpus of monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico City consisting of seven speakers between the ages of 10 and 40 served as a control group. Sociolinguistic interviews were conducted in Spanish by the lead author. /e group consisted of seven speakers: four women and three men. Because our project was focused on documenting the varieties of Spanish and English spoken by Mexican Americans in South Texas, we did not collect 3eld data with non-Latino English monolinguals. However, the literature is now replete with PVI scores for English monolinguals calculated with the same protocols. We reference those 3ndings in the results section.

%.! Phonetic methods

Recent discussions taking place among phoneticians and laboratory phonologists (e.g. Arvaniti 2012; Prieto et al. 2012) working on prosodic rhythm have made clear that no single quantitative measure perfectly captures cross-linguistic rhyth-mic di0erences. Because individual speaker di0erences, di0erences in experi-mental task, and cross-linguistic phonological di0erences all in1uence rhythm metrics, careful decisions must be made about which measure to use to quantify prosody, especially in cross-linguistic studies. We have chosen to work with Low

'. In the case of participants who switched to English, only the initial Spanish portion was measured for rhythm using PVI.

Cross-generational prosodic convergence in South Texas Spanish %"

and Grabe’s (1995) Pairwise Variability Index formula, which involves the abso-lute value of the di0erence between adjacent syllables divided by the mean of the two syllables. We have chosen this method for two reasons. First, we are analyzing sociolinguistic interviews conducted in the 3eld, not reading passages collected in soundproof booths. PVI is easily adaptable to these types of data, as described below. Second, we are working in the context of a growing body of literature in variationist sociolinguistics in which PVI is used to quantify prosodic rhythm, as described in the prior review of the literature. /e data reported here are therefore instantly comparable to those data reported in similar community based sociolin-guistic studies.

Low and Grabe (2002) discuss two PVI formulae: rPVI and nPVI and we would like to clarify which of these we are using here. rPVI, or ‘raw’ Pairwise Variability Index, is most suitable for measuring consonant intervals. nPVI or ‘normalized’ Pairwise Variability Index, is more suitable for measuring vocalic in-tervals. /e normalized formula has the advantage of better controlling for speech rate, which is important given our use of naturalistic data. We are therefore tech-nically using what is referred to in the phonetics literature as nPVI.5 However, following the other sociolinguistic 3eld studies to use this metric, we refer to nPVI here simply as ‘PVI.’

Spectrograms made from 3eld recordings in Spanish and English were ana-lyzed for rhythm using PRAAT (Boersma and Weenik 2013). Because natural-istic speech from sociolinguistic 3eld interviews tends to be less spectrographi-cally clear than in laboratory speech, and because the identi3cation of consonant boundaries is di4cult or impossible in some 3eld recordings, we decided to work with vocalic nuclei only. Here, we follow the modi3cations set forth in Carter (2005) and /omas and Carter (2006), which also relied on spontaneous, natural-istic speech. /erefore, duration measurements were taken at the onset and o0set of the vocalic nucleus of each syllable, which consisted of either a monopthon-gal vowel or a diphthong. PVI quotients were then calculated using the Pairwise Variability Index equation described above.

Figure 2 shows a spectrogram for the utterance éranos cuatro hermanos6 taken from a sociolinguistic interview with the oldest female speaker in the Las Alas cor-pus. /e parallel vertical lines delimit the duration for the vowel [a] in hermanos.

#. Following /omas and Carter (2006) we have also dispensed with multiplying PVI quotients by 100.

(. Éranos cuatro hermanos. ENG: We were four brothers. /e utterance uses the non-standard, local pattern of imperfect tense morphology in which -mos is replaced by -nos.

'& Phillip M. Carter and Tonya Wolford

!."!##$! $.!#!

Figure 2. Spectrogram of éranos cuatro hermanos showing duration of [a]

We have included the spectrogram in order to provide a description of how the PVI method works using data from our corpus of interviews. For example, the duration of [a] in hermanos, delimited in the spectrogram,7 would be calculated for PVI with the durations of each of the adjacent vowels, namely the [e] and [o] in hermanos. We refer to these calculations as comparisons. Each vowel-to-vowel comparison (e.g., [a] with [e]; [a] with [o]) yields one PVI quotient. A minimum of 125 PVI quotients was calculated per speaker. A mean PVI score was calcu-lated for each speaker by averaging all calculated quotients per speaker. /e PVI scores of all individual speakers within an age group were then aggregated, and a mean PVI score was computed for each age group in both languages, English and Spanish. A group mean was also computed for the Spanish monolingual con-trol group. Overall, 1,715 syllable-to-syllable comparisons were made in Las Alas Spanish, 3,082 comparisons in Las Alas English, and 1,472 comparisons for the monolingual Spanish control group.

Table 1 provides a summary of the speaker sample, including the Las Alas par-ticipants across three age groups (recorded in both Spanish and English), as well as the control group consisting of monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico City. /e number of PVI comparisons per group is reported in the middle column and mean PVI scores are reported by language and age group in the rightmost column. Spanish and English language data come from the same speakers. In some cases, interviews were not conducted in one or the other language for certain speakers, usually due to participant time constraints, thus leading to di0erences in the num-ber of speakers per cell. In the discussion that follows, we use the terms “syllable-timing” and “stress-timing” in a relative, not absolute, sense in order to situate the data on a continuum of prosodic timing in which one pole can be thought of as

). During analysis, the formant tracker in PRAAT was turned on to help delimit vowel bound-aries.

Cross-generational prosodic convergence in South Texas Spanish '$

the most syllable-timed and the other the most stress-timed. /e data we present here can therefore only be thought of as ‘more’ or ‘less’ syllable timed or ‘more’ or ‘less’ stress timed.

'. Results

/e quantitative analysis presented below addresses three questions described at the outset of this article. First, to what extent does the prosodic rhythm of Spanish in the community di0er from the prosodic rhythm of Spanish of monolingual speakers outside of the U.S.? /at is, is this contact variety of Spanish rhythmically di0erent than non-contact varieties at the level of the speech community? To our knowledge, this question has not yet been addressed empirically in any cross-gen-erational community study using naturalistic speech collected in the 3eld. Second, how do the prosodic systems of Spanish and English relate to each other within the community? And 3nally, how stable is the prosodic timing of Spanish in the community, in light of the multiple generations of sustained contact with English, and little immigration from Mexico?

Figure 3 provides an overall snapshot of the PVI data for the entire sample, depicting the mean PVI scores for all groups of speakers considered in this analy-sis, including: the monolingual Spanish control group and the older, middle, and

Table 1. PVI input summary and group mean scores by languageGroups Speakers, Total PVI Comparisons, Mean PVI

Speakers PVI Comparisons Mean PVISpanish in Las AlasOlder 4 620 .2916Middle 4 524 .3646Youngest 4 571 .4271Total 12 1,715English in Las AlasOlder 6 1,182 .4422Middle 4 990 .4522Youngest 5 910 .4515Total 15 3,082Control Spanish (Mexico)All ages 7 1,471 .275Total 7 1,471

'! Phillip M. Carter and Tonya Wolford

young Las Alas age groups in Spanish and English. Mean PVI is plotted on the y-axis. Higher PVI scores indicate more stress-timing, characteristic of languages in the Germanic branch of Indo-European (e.g. English), while lower scores indi-cate more syllable-timing, characteristic of languages in the Italic branch of Indo-European (e.g. Spanish). Signi3cance is depicted with error bars.

An initial ANOVA indicated that PVI di0ered signi3cantly as a function of group and language. Accordingly, post-hoc t-tests were conducted using SPSS to compare each age group / language combination with every other age group / lan-guage combination in the study. For example, the mean PVI score for the Spanish of the oldest group was compared to the mean PVI score for the Spanish of all other groups, and also to the mean PVI score for the English of the oldest group, and so on. Statistical testing yielded a number of signi3cant 3ndings. Table 2 presents the results of two analyses: 3rst, the results of tests examining di0erences in Spanish prosodic rhythm across the three age groups (top of the table), and the results of tests examining di0erences between the prosodic rhythm of Spanish and English within age groups (bottom of the table). /e age groups and languages shown in the le2most and middle columns were compared to each other; the rightmost col-umn reports the results of t-tests comparing those groups.

A number of important 3ndings emerge from the statistical analysis of pro-sodic rhythm of Spanish in the three Las Alas age groups. Most striking is the fact that the Spanish rhythm of each age group is signi3cantly di0erent than the Spanish rhythm of the next age group. /is 3nding bears out for all cross-age-group comparisons made, including older with middle, middle with younger, and older with younger. Moreover, the di0erences in PVI across age groups follow a linear trajectory of change from more-to-less syllable-timed, such that the Spanish

All Mexico Older Middle Younger

Spanish English

Figure 3. PVI Scores by generation

Cross-generational prosodic convergence in South Texas Spanish '%

of each successive generation is signi3cantly more stress-timed than that of the prior generation.

/e 3rst signi3cant cross-generational change — that between the oldest gen-eration and their children — corresponds to the historical period during which school desegregation took place. /e Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme case was passed in 1954 and declared unconstitutional all state laws that established separate schools for White and African American students. In the Las Alas com-munity, the primary form of school segregation was between Whites and Mexican Americans, who attended separate schools on opposite sides of the railroad track that divides the town into East and West parts. Prior to desegregation, a small African American minority attended the primarily Mexican American schools lo-cated on the West side of the tracks. In this part of South Texas, the Brown decision did not begin to take e0ect until the 1960s, the moment at which the children of the oldest group of participants in this study were beginning school.

Comparisons between the rhythm of each of the three Las Alas age groups and the Spanish-monolingual control group help make legible the transformation in prosodic rhythm across generations in Las Alas Spanish, and lend support to the interpretation of a prosodic split in the community during the mid-20th Century. As reported in Table 1, the mean PVI score for the control group of monolin-gual Spanish speakers was .275; the mean score for the oldest group of Las Alas residents was .2916, and as reported in Table 2, this di0erence is not signi3cant. In other words, the prosodic rhythm of the oldest Spanish speakers in the com-munity is statistically equivalent to the prosodic rhythm of monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico City. In contrast, the Spanish prosodic rhythm of both the

Table 2. Statistical di0erences between age groups (Spanish) and within groups (Spanish and English)Age group 1 (Spanish) Age group 2 (Spanish) p-valueOlder Younger p = .0001Older Middle p = .0001Older Control p = n.s.Middle Control p = .0001Middle Younger p = .0032Young Control p = .0001Age group (Spanish) Age group (English) p-valueOlder Older p = .0001Middle Middle p = .0001Younger Younger p = n.s.

'' Phillip M. Carter and Tonya Wolford

middle age group (PVI = .3646) and the youngest age group (PVI = .4271) di0ers signi3cantly from that of the monolingual Spanish speakers from Mexico City. /us, it appears that the rhythmic structure of Spanish in the community did not change from the immigrant generation in the 1880s through the 1910s and 1920s when the oldest speakers in this study were born. /is appears to be the case even though English was the language of formal education for the oldest speakers in Las Alas schools. Divergence from the rhythmic structure of monolingual Spanish does not appear until the middle age group, who were the 3rst in the community to be educated in integrated schools. Figure 4 presents a timeline of events in the history of Las Alas that relate to the development of both languages in the com-munity, including the arrival of the 3rst Mexican immigrants at the end of the 19th Century, the integration of the public school system in the mid-20th Century, and approximate ranges of birth for the three age groups examined in this study.

Gen II Born

SchoolDesegregation

First Dual LanguageProgram

Oldest Gen I Born

Railroad - FirstMex Americans

!$!% !$&#s

!$%#–!$&#s

!$"#–!$$#s

Gen III Born

Figure 4. Timeline of events in ‘Las Alas,’ Texas

/e preceding analysis shows that there is unambiguous change in the prosod-ic rhythm across age groups in the Las Alas community such that each succes-sive group is signi3cantly less syllable-timed than the prior group. However, this analysis does not indicate how the cross-generational changes in the rhythm of Spanish relate to English. To shed light on the relationship between the patterning of Spanish and English in the community, t-tests were also run comparing PVI scores of both languages within each age group. /e bottom of Table 2 provides the results of this analysis. First, the PVI scores for the Spanish and English of the oldest speakers are signi3cantly di0erent, indicating that the rhythm of Spanish and English are clearly di0erentiated for that group. /is is unsurprising in light of the fact that the Spanish of the oldest group is not signi3cantly di0erent from the Spanish of the monolingual Spanish-speaking control group. Next, although the preceding analysis showed that there was signi3cant change to Spanish in the community from the oldest to middle age groups, the rhythm of Spanish and English remain distinctive for the middle age group. /at is, the prosodic timing of Spanish in the middle age group has not intersected with the English timing, despite becoming signi3cantly more stress-timed during the second half of the

Cross-generational prosodic convergence in South Texas Spanish '#

20th Century. Finally, like the Spanish of their parents’ generation, the Spanish of the youngest generation moved further in the direction of stress-timing, only this time arriving at the same level of stress-timing in Spanish as in English. /at is, there is no signi3cant di0erence in prosodic rhythm between the English and the Spanish of the youngest generation, as captured by the PVI metric. /is is the most important 3nding, as it shows convergence of the prosodic systems as a re-sult of a change-in-progress accompanying language shi2 and language attrition in the community. Figure 5 depicts the overall relationship between Spanish and English prosodic rhythm in the community as a function of time. Each individual speaker considered in the study is represented in the plot in English and Spanish, with mean PVI scores on the y-axis and individual year of birth on the x-axis. Each point on the plot represents the mean PVI score for an individual, with triangles representing Spanish and crosses representing English.

!.&'(!! '(&! '($!

Birth year

'("! '()! &!!!

latino english

spanish

Figure 5. PVI Scores, by birth year

/e signi3cant change over time to Spanish prosodic rhythm is made clear in the plot presented in Figure 5. Crosses (English) and triangles (Spanish) are separate for the oldest speakers, but begin to intermingle for speakers in the youngest age group who were born in the 1980s and 1990s. /e distinction between Spanish and English prosodic rhythm that is maintained in the two oldest age groups is lost in the speech of the youngest generation. /is convergence is also evidenced by the lines of best 3t, both signi3cant at p < .05, which intersect for the very youngest speakers, born in the 1990s.

'( Phillip M. Carter and Tonya Wolford

#. Discussion

To summarize, four main 3ndings emerge from the analysis of prosodic rhythm in the Spanish and English spoken in Las Alas:

1. /e rhythm of Spanish for the oldest age group, born as early as 1915, is not signi3cantly di0erent than that of monolingual Spanish speakers. /is sug-gests that this degree of syllable-timing was maintained in Las Alas through the early 20th Century.

2. /e Spanish of each successive age group is signi3cantly less syllable-timed than that of the prior age group. /is shi2 begins with the Spanish of the mid-dle age group, who were the 3rst group to attend integrated schools following the desegregation e0orts that took place in the community during the 1960s.

3. /e movement from more to less syllable-timing for Spanish reaches its limit in the speech of the youngest speakers, who demonstrate a single, converged pattern of prosodic timing for both languages.

4. Despite clear modi3cation to the prosodic rhythm of Spanish in the commu-nity during the 20th Century, there is no evidence of change to the prosodic rhythm of English.

Here we must make two 3nal points about the relationship between English and Spanish prosodic rhythm in the community. First, although it is clear that English has exerted signi3cant in1uence on Spanish in Las Alas in terms of prosodic tim-ing, the speci3c pathways through which this in1uence was facilitated are still not known. Did an independent system of English stress-timing weaken an inde-pendent system of Spanish syllable-timing? Or is the convergence of Spanish and English rhythm in the community a second-order e0ect of structural changes tak-ing place to other parts of the language? Our sense from listening to the interviews and analysing prosodic rhythm spectrographically is that changes to Spanish rhythm in the community co-occur with changes in the phonological structure of the language, including, especially, the introduction of unstressed vowel reduction to schwa in the Spanish of the youngest speakers.8

Second, we must emphasize that the terms ‘syllable-’ and ‘stress-timing’ are relative, as has been described in the sociolinguistic and dialectological literature on rhythm. We have been reluctant to name the Spanish of the youngest genera-tion ‘stress-timed’ for this reason, even though it is statistically equivalent to their

*. Although some monolingual varieties of Spanish are said to demonstrate certain patterns of vowel reduction, including varieties in Northern and Central Mexico (Lipski 1990), and some Andean varieties of South America (Lipski 1990, Delforge 2008), the phenomenon is not as widespread as in the English of North America.

Cross-generational prosodic convergence in South Texas Spanish ')

English production. A quick glance at Figure 1, adapted from Carter (2005), shows that English in Las Alas aligns closely with the English of Latino immigrants from Mexico living in North Carolina, but the English of both these groups is rhyth-mically quite di0erent from the English of African American and Anglo White speakers in North Carolina. A valuable point to make, then, is that Spanish has also likely exerted signi3cant in1uence on the prosody of English in Las Alas. /is in1uence probably took place when the 3rst immigrants from Mexico came to Las Alas in the 1880s to work on the railroad. English among Mexican Americans in Las Alas is more syllable-timed than the varieties of English spoken in English monolingual communities, such as those reported in /omas and Carter (2006). /us, the more syllable-timed English appears to be a durable dialect feature in the English of Mexican Americans in this community, where syllable-timing likely derives from the historical in1uence of Spanish. /is interpretation aligns with Henriksen’s (2013) 3nding that L2 prosodic rhythm is a0ected by the 3rst lan-guage.

Two 3nal points should be made about how our data compare with Robles-Puente’s (2014) study of Mexican American prosodic rhythm in Los Angeles, keeping in mind that we are comparing di0erent types of data (read speech in Los Angeles versus spontaneous speech in Las Alas). In his comparison of immigrants, children of immigrants, and the Los Angeles-born, Robles-Puente found that only the Los Angeles born made a prosodic distinction between English and Spanish. /e Los Angeles-born participants correspond roughly to Las Alas middle gen-eration in that both are the 3rst full generation to be born in the U.S., and both make a prosodic distinction between English and Spanish. Our data show that complete prosodic convergence takes place in the next generation. /e question remains as to whether or not the children of Robles-Puentes’ (2014) Los Angeles-born participants will maintain the distinction or undergo convergence along the lines of the Las Alas young age group. /e answer will surely depend on matters of language ecology and population demographics; “recontact” (Lynch 2000) with incoming Spanish speakers in Los Angeles could favor the maintenance of a sepa-rate Spanish system of prosodic rhythm into the next generation.

(. Conclusions

/is study has presented a quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of Spanish prosodic rhythm in the speech of three generations of Mexican Americans living South Texas. At the outset of this paper, we asked three questions about Spanish pro-sodic rhythm in the community — (1) how does Las Alas Spanish compare with non-contact varieties, (2) how stable is Las Alas Spanish prosody over time, and

'* Phillip M. Carter and Tonya Wolford

(3) what is the source of any empirically observed change? We are now prepared to answer these questions.

As we consider the big picture, it makes little sense to compare Las Alas Spanish rhythm on the whole to noncontact or monolingual varieties of Spanish. /is is because change taking place to prosodic rhythm in the community over time has resulted in a situation in which each successive generation is signi3cantly more stress-timed than the generation that preceded it. /ere is, in e0ect, no single Las Alas Spanish rhythm to speak of as such, but rather prosodies constrained by generation. /is is of course also the answer to the second question about the stability of Spanish prosody in the community. Our data show that while English prosodic rhythm remains stable over time, Spanish prosodic rhythm moves swi2-ly to complete convergence with English prosodic rhythm by the speech of the youngest speakers. /e swi2ness of this convergence is likely facilitated by the dual processes of language shi2 and Spanish language attrition taking place in the com-munity, which are in turn tied to events in the history of the community.

Finally, the contentious issue of English in1uence on Spanish in the United States appears to be much less complicated when we are looking at phonetics rather than grammar. /e convergence of Spanish prosodic rhythm with English prosodic rhythm across generations in the Las Alas speech community is starkly clear. However, we must be careful with the language we use to describe this con-vergence. We are not putting forth an argument in which English prosody has been “transferred” directly to Spanish, nor are we suggesting that Spanish prosodic rhythm has been simpli3ed as it converges with English. While it is the case that possessing one prosodic system is simpler than possessing two, it is not the case that “stress-timing” is more or less basic than “syllable-timing.” Modi3cations to the rhythmic system of Spanish in the community may be due to the shading of the segmental phonology on account of contact with English, rather than independent changes to the suprasegmental system itself. To the extent that additional phono-logical processes have been added to the production of Spanish in the commu-nity (e.g. unstressed vowel reduction), one could say that changes to the prosodic structure of Spanish in the community are the result of increased complexity rather than simpli3cation. /e relationship between segmental and suprasegmental pho-nology is one that warrants greater research, particularly as it pertains questions of language change. /e theoretical conversations arising from the empirical study of Spanish in the United States will bene3t from a broadening of the types of variables we analyze. A great deal more work on the phonetics and phonology of varieties of Spanish in the United States is needed to complement the long history of gram-matical analysis of Spanish, which has traditionally received pride of place in our 3eld. In particular, features of Spanish prosody, such as rhythm, remain woefully understudied and therefore represent fertile ground for future research.

Cross-generational prosodic convergence in South Texas Spanish '"

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Authors’ addressPhillip M. CarterFlorida International University, Linguistics Program11200 SW 8th Street, DM 453Miami, FL 33199United States

pmcarter@3u.edu

Tonya E. Wolford

twolford@philasd.org

Received: December 11, 2013 Final revision received: September 3, 2014 Accepted: September 8, 2014

Cross-generational Prosodic Convergence in South Texas Spanish

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