In a previous study on voiceless stop aspiration in Heritage Calabrian Italian spoken in Toronto,... more In a previous study on voiceless stop aspiration in Heritage Calabrian Italian spoken in Toronto, we found that the transmission of a sociophonetic variable differed from cross-generational phonetic variation induced by increased contact with the majority language. Universal phonetic factors and the social characteristics of the speakers appeared to influence contact-induced variation much more straightforwardly than the transmission of the sociophonetic variable. In the current study, we investigate further, examining possible alternative explanations related to the lexical distribution of the aspiration phenomena. We test two alternative hypotheses, the first one predicting that the diffusion of a majority language’s phonetic feature is frequency-driven while change in a sociophonetic feature is not (or not that regularly across generations), and the second one predicting that sociophonetic aspiration decreases across generations by being progressively more dependent on the freque...
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 2017
The New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference (NWAV) is recognized worldwide as a major forum de... more The New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference (NWAV) is recognized worldwide as a major forum devoted to the presentation of research in the variationist sociolinguistic framework. Its objectives over its nearly half-century of existence have been to foster the study of language in its social context by providing a venue in which the latest theoretical, methodological and technical developments in the quantitative analysis of natural speech are showcased. After decades of building on strong empirical foundations, the time has come for a re-engagement among sociolinguistics and linguistics more broadly. Opportunities for integration across related disciplines are valuable ways of making advances, both descriptive and theoretical. Understanding how humans deploy variation to facilitate communication while the language itself continues to change is a fundamental element in understanding human language, society and interaction. Recent progress in the field can be linked to researchers’ abilities to leverage new methods and implement novel and increasingly large datasets. These advances have expanded the available testable hypotheses as well as the diversity and representativeness of language data that can be brought to
This study examines cross-generational transmission of a sociophonetic variable in a heritage lan... more This study examines cross-generational transmission of a sociophonetic variable in a heritage language context. Voiceless stop aspiration is a sociophonetic variable in Calabrian Italian, indexing socio-cultural values about the speaker's social and geographical origin. We investigate the production of voiceless stops by three generations of Calabrian Italians (immigrants and the next two generations) in Toronto, via acoustic and auditory analysis of nearly 5000 tokens from conversational speech in Calabrian Italian. Both Italian and English use long-lag VOT, but they differ in its phonological distribution: long-lag VOT is preferentially associated with pre-tonic, wordinitial stops in English and with post-tonic, post-sonorant or geminate stops in Calabrian Italian. We show that, in heritage Calabrian Italian in Toronto, both phonetic implementation (cued by VOT duration) and phonological distribution of aspiration (as cued by perceived aspiration rate across phonological contexts) change crossgenerationally, but some changes are non-linear, as third generation speakers appear to reproduce some patterns attested in the speech of first generation speakers. External variables such as the sex of the speakers modulate the cross-generational effects, with males producing more aspirated stops and exhibiting a more conservative behavior in certain phonetic contexts.
Social Lives in Language – Sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities, 2008
... Table 3. Profiles of the speakers Work Grammar Pseudonym Sex Contact Education Friends langua... more ... Table 3. Profiles of the speakers Work Grammar Pseudonym Sex Contact Education Friends language score Jocelyn F high high French spouse both 95100% Ted M high high French friends both 95100% Vincent M high high French friends English 95100% Liz F high high ...
Ethnic Orientation, defined as speakers' sociolinguistic practices and attitudes, does not affect... more Ethnic Orientation, defined as speakers' sociolinguistic practices and attitudes, does not affect all communities, languages, or linguistic variables equally. We illustrate that the types of differences that emerge depend on methodological decisions, particularly at the analysis stage. We provide examples of inter-community differences including some that emerge differently depending on the method of analysis. This is accomplished by comparison of Heritage Language patterns among groups of Toronto residents: speakers of Heritage Cantonese, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish; and English patterns in Chinese-descent and Italian-descent Torontonians, comparing across three generations since immigration. We examine the variables pro-drop and Voice Onset Time in the Heritage Language data. The Canadian Vowel Shift and consonant cluster simplification are examined in English. We show that no Ethnic Orientation facets correlate to all types of linguistic variation. The relationships found between linguistic variables and Ethnic Orientation variables suggest Ethnic Orientation is a key factor in modeling variation in Heritage Language communities-their variation should not be attributed solely to subtractive processes like incomplete acquisition or attrition.
This paper investigates subject doubling in Faetar, an endangered and understudied variety of Fra... more This paper investigates subject doubling in Faetar, an endangered and understudied variety of Francoprovencal. Comparing Homeland speakers (i.e., speakers who were born and raised in Faeto) and Heritage speakers of the language (i.e., speakers who emigrated to Toronto, Canada after age 18, and their children), we find some striking differences. Our results show that subject doubling is grammatically constrained in the source variety: Homeland speakers favor doubling in new information contexts, while Heritage speakers do not. There is also evidence for a change in progress among Homeland speakers, with younger speakers using more subject doubling than older speakers. This change is not mirrored by the Heritage speakers. We propose that this is because the Heritage speakers left the Homeland either before or around the time that the youngest Homeland speakers in our sample were born, resulting in them having missed out on this change. This highlights that both Homeland and Heritage v...
Around the world, COVID-19 lockdowns have caused abrupt shifts in the amount of time spent at hom... more Around the world, COVID-19 lockdowns have caused abrupt shifts in the amount of time spent at home versus out of the home for work, school, and recreation. As a result, many individuals have experienced a disruption in the frequency and type of their interactions. Given the importance of intergenerational transmission and intergenerational interaction for promoting language maintenance, and the importance of peer-to-peer interaction for promoting language shift, we ask how these abrupt changes necessitated by social distancing will affect language use and attitudes, specifically short- and long-term language maintenance or shift involving heritage languages. We examine principles of language maintenance and shift in the context of the COVID-19 lockdown for university students, people still involved in critical acts of identity creation. Here we describe a survey designed to learn how the lockdown is affecting young people’s language ecologies and attitudes. Using both quantitative a...
We focus on complexity from the comparative variationist perspective, a sociolinguistic approach ... more We focus on complexity from the comparative variationist perspective, a sociolinguistic approach that examines variable aspects of language (that is, different ways of saying the same thing). Arguably, variable elements are harder to acquire than categorical ones, as a Variability Matrix must be acquired along with every element. This matrix contains probabilistic information about when each form is (more) appropriate, according to an array of factors. These include inter-speaker (social) and intra-speaker (linguistic context) predictors. We ask how the Variability Matrix for predictors of a variable compares between heritage speakers (people living in a context where their language is a minority language) and homeland speakers (people living in a context where their language is a majority language), and how these can fairly be compared. In the variationist approach, multivariate regression analyses reveal the predictors (and levels within each predictor) of a response or dependent ...
The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, 2021
This chapter reports on the status of heritage languages (HLs) in Canada in usage, in research an... more This chapter reports on the status of heritage languages (HLs) in Canada in usage, in research and in education. It begins with an overview of HLs in Canada and the current ethnolinguistic vitality (demographics, institutional support and status) of these language varieties. This includes an overview of programs to teach HLs (or to use HLs as the medium of instruction) in primary, secondary and post-secondary contexts. Census information is provided to profile the distribution of HL speakers across major cities and all the provinces and territories of Canada, and the status of the HLs. The next section surveys publications about HLs in Canada including overviews, studies from the domain of sociolinguistics (language variation and change) that rely on spontaneous speech corpora, acquisition studies employing experimental methodology, and research on pedagogical approaches, noting primary findings from each. Specific information is provided about heritage varieties of Cantonese, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Inuktitut, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Ukrainian.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2020
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effectiveness-proven therapy method in the psychosocial ... more Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effectiveness-proven therapy method in the psychosocial treatment of childhood internalizing disorder. Considering the techniques included, even though anxiety and major depression are two different disorders, they are observed to occupy a quite common pool in terms of their similar nature, symptoms, etiologies, and high comorbidity rates. While these techniques are rationally similar to those in adult CBT, application ways, contents, session structures of the techniques, and styles of homework should be adapted to the developmental characteristics of children. In this book chapter, initially, several CBT programs for childhood internalizing disorders will be mentioned. After than, main points to take into consideration while adapting CBT, which was firstly designed for adults to children, will be emphasized. Lastly, information about main CBT techniques, whose effectiveness has been proven in the treatment of internalizing disorders, will be given.
Acquisition et interaction en langue étrangère, 2002
Note des auteurs : Nous remercions les évaluateurs de cet article pour la qualité et la pertinenc... more Note des auteurs : Nous remercions les évaluateurs de cet article pour la qualité et la pertinence de leurs commentaires. La couleur locale du français L2 des anglo-montréalais Acquisition et interaction en langue étrangère, 17 | 2002
We use a comparative variationist framework to compare variable word-final obstruent devoicing pa... more We use a comparative variationist framework to compare variable word-final obstruent devoicing patterns in heritage Polish, English and homeland Polish in conversational speech. Phonological and lexical factors are shown to condition this variation differently in the three varieties. We have a particular interest in one other factor relevant to heritage speakers: the amount of code-switching between Polish and English by each speaker. We show that, for second generation heritage speakers, individuals’ code-switching rates are positively correlated with their rates of devoicing. Based on the qualitatively and quantitatively different devoicing patterns of heritage Polish speakers, compared to both homeland Polish and Toronto English, we argue that the phonological grammar of this group of speakers constitutes a convergence of the heritage language and the dominant language’s grammars and suggest that frequent codeswitching provides the context in which these speakers’ knowledge of Po...
Heritage language speakers have frequently been reported to have language skills weaker than home... more Heritage language speakers have frequently been reported to have language skills weaker than homeland (monolingual) speakers. For example, Wei and Lee (2001, p. 359), a study of British-born Chinese-English bilingual children’s morphosyntactic patterns (including classifier use), report “evidence of delayed and stagnated L1 development.” However, many studies compare heritage speaker performance to a prescriptive standard rather than to spontaneous speech from homeland speakers. We compare spontaneous speech data from two generations of Heritage Cantonese speakers in Toronto, Canada, and from Homeland Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. Both groups are similar in a strong preference for general and mass classifiers, and classifier choice being primarily governed by the noun’s number. We observe specialization of go3 個 to singular nouns, a grammaticalization process increasing with each generation. The similarity between homeland and heritage patterns replicates previous studies utilizi...
In a previous study on voiceless stop aspiration in Heritage Calabrian Italian spoken in Toronto,... more In a previous study on voiceless stop aspiration in Heritage Calabrian Italian spoken in Toronto, we found that the transmission of a sociophonetic variable differed from cross-generational phonetic variation induced by increased contact with the majority language. Universal phonetic factors and the social characteristics of the speakers appeared to influence contact-induced variation much more straightforwardly than the transmission of the sociophonetic variable. In the current study, we investigate further, examining possible alternative explanations related to the lexical distribution of the aspiration phenomena. We test two alternative hypotheses, the first one predicting that the diffusion of a majority language’s phonetic feature is frequency-driven while change in a sociophonetic feature is not (or not that regularly across generations), and the second one predicting that sociophonetic aspiration decreases across generations by being progressively more dependent on the freque...
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 2017
The New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference (NWAV) is recognized worldwide as a major forum de... more The New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference (NWAV) is recognized worldwide as a major forum devoted to the presentation of research in the variationist sociolinguistic framework. Its objectives over its nearly half-century of existence have been to foster the study of language in its social context by providing a venue in which the latest theoretical, methodological and technical developments in the quantitative analysis of natural speech are showcased. After decades of building on strong empirical foundations, the time has come for a re-engagement among sociolinguistics and linguistics more broadly. Opportunities for integration across related disciplines are valuable ways of making advances, both descriptive and theoretical. Understanding how humans deploy variation to facilitate communication while the language itself continues to change is a fundamental element in understanding human language, society and interaction. Recent progress in the field can be linked to researchers’ abilities to leverage new methods and implement novel and increasingly large datasets. These advances have expanded the available testable hypotheses as well as the diversity and representativeness of language data that can be brought to
This study examines cross-generational transmission of a sociophonetic variable in a heritage lan... more This study examines cross-generational transmission of a sociophonetic variable in a heritage language context. Voiceless stop aspiration is a sociophonetic variable in Calabrian Italian, indexing socio-cultural values about the speaker's social and geographical origin. We investigate the production of voiceless stops by three generations of Calabrian Italians (immigrants and the next two generations) in Toronto, via acoustic and auditory analysis of nearly 5000 tokens from conversational speech in Calabrian Italian. Both Italian and English use long-lag VOT, but they differ in its phonological distribution: long-lag VOT is preferentially associated with pre-tonic, wordinitial stops in English and with post-tonic, post-sonorant or geminate stops in Calabrian Italian. We show that, in heritage Calabrian Italian in Toronto, both phonetic implementation (cued by VOT duration) and phonological distribution of aspiration (as cued by perceived aspiration rate across phonological contexts) change crossgenerationally, but some changes are non-linear, as third generation speakers appear to reproduce some patterns attested in the speech of first generation speakers. External variables such as the sex of the speakers modulate the cross-generational effects, with males producing more aspirated stops and exhibiting a more conservative behavior in certain phonetic contexts.
Social Lives in Language – Sociolinguistics and multilingual speech communities, 2008
... Table 3. Profiles of the speakers Work Grammar Pseudonym Sex Contact Education Friends langua... more ... Table 3. Profiles of the speakers Work Grammar Pseudonym Sex Contact Education Friends language score Jocelyn F high high French spouse both 95100% Ted M high high French friends both 95100% Vincent M high high French friends English 95100% Liz F high high ...
Ethnic Orientation, defined as speakers' sociolinguistic practices and attitudes, does not affect... more Ethnic Orientation, defined as speakers' sociolinguistic practices and attitudes, does not affect all communities, languages, or linguistic variables equally. We illustrate that the types of differences that emerge depend on methodological decisions, particularly at the analysis stage. We provide examples of inter-community differences including some that emerge differently depending on the method of analysis. This is accomplished by comparison of Heritage Language patterns among groups of Toronto residents: speakers of Heritage Cantonese, Italian, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish; and English patterns in Chinese-descent and Italian-descent Torontonians, comparing across three generations since immigration. We examine the variables pro-drop and Voice Onset Time in the Heritage Language data. The Canadian Vowel Shift and consonant cluster simplification are examined in English. We show that no Ethnic Orientation facets correlate to all types of linguistic variation. The relationships found between linguistic variables and Ethnic Orientation variables suggest Ethnic Orientation is a key factor in modeling variation in Heritage Language communities-their variation should not be attributed solely to subtractive processes like incomplete acquisition or attrition.
This paper investigates subject doubling in Faetar, an endangered and understudied variety of Fra... more This paper investigates subject doubling in Faetar, an endangered and understudied variety of Francoprovencal. Comparing Homeland speakers (i.e., speakers who were born and raised in Faeto) and Heritage speakers of the language (i.e., speakers who emigrated to Toronto, Canada after age 18, and their children), we find some striking differences. Our results show that subject doubling is grammatically constrained in the source variety: Homeland speakers favor doubling in new information contexts, while Heritage speakers do not. There is also evidence for a change in progress among Homeland speakers, with younger speakers using more subject doubling than older speakers. This change is not mirrored by the Heritage speakers. We propose that this is because the Heritage speakers left the Homeland either before or around the time that the youngest Homeland speakers in our sample were born, resulting in them having missed out on this change. This highlights that both Homeland and Heritage v...
Around the world, COVID-19 lockdowns have caused abrupt shifts in the amount of time spent at hom... more Around the world, COVID-19 lockdowns have caused abrupt shifts in the amount of time spent at home versus out of the home for work, school, and recreation. As a result, many individuals have experienced a disruption in the frequency and type of their interactions. Given the importance of intergenerational transmission and intergenerational interaction for promoting language maintenance, and the importance of peer-to-peer interaction for promoting language shift, we ask how these abrupt changes necessitated by social distancing will affect language use and attitudes, specifically short- and long-term language maintenance or shift involving heritage languages. We examine principles of language maintenance and shift in the context of the COVID-19 lockdown for university students, people still involved in critical acts of identity creation. Here we describe a survey designed to learn how the lockdown is affecting young people’s language ecologies and attitudes. Using both quantitative a...
We focus on complexity from the comparative variationist perspective, a sociolinguistic approach ... more We focus on complexity from the comparative variationist perspective, a sociolinguistic approach that examines variable aspects of language (that is, different ways of saying the same thing). Arguably, variable elements are harder to acquire than categorical ones, as a Variability Matrix must be acquired along with every element. This matrix contains probabilistic information about when each form is (more) appropriate, according to an array of factors. These include inter-speaker (social) and intra-speaker (linguistic context) predictors. We ask how the Variability Matrix for predictors of a variable compares between heritage speakers (people living in a context where their language is a minority language) and homeland speakers (people living in a context where their language is a majority language), and how these can fairly be compared. In the variationist approach, multivariate regression analyses reveal the predictors (and levels within each predictor) of a response or dependent ...
The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, 2021
This chapter reports on the status of heritage languages (HLs) in Canada in usage, in research an... more This chapter reports on the status of heritage languages (HLs) in Canada in usage, in research and in education. It begins with an overview of HLs in Canada and the current ethnolinguistic vitality (demographics, institutional support and status) of these language varieties. This includes an overview of programs to teach HLs (or to use HLs as the medium of instruction) in primary, secondary and post-secondary contexts. Census information is provided to profile the distribution of HL speakers across major cities and all the provinces and territories of Canada, and the status of the HLs. The next section surveys publications about HLs in Canada including overviews, studies from the domain of sociolinguistics (language variation and change) that rely on spontaneous speech corpora, acquisition studies employing experimental methodology, and research on pedagogical approaches, noting primary findings from each. Specific information is provided about heritage varieties of Cantonese, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Inuktitut, Korean, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Ukrainian.
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2020
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effectiveness-proven therapy method in the psychosocial ... more Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effectiveness-proven therapy method in the psychosocial treatment of childhood internalizing disorder. Considering the techniques included, even though anxiety and major depression are two different disorders, they are observed to occupy a quite common pool in terms of their similar nature, symptoms, etiologies, and high comorbidity rates. While these techniques are rationally similar to those in adult CBT, application ways, contents, session structures of the techniques, and styles of homework should be adapted to the developmental characteristics of children. In this book chapter, initially, several CBT programs for childhood internalizing disorders will be mentioned. After than, main points to take into consideration while adapting CBT, which was firstly designed for adults to children, will be emphasized. Lastly, information about main CBT techniques, whose effectiveness has been proven in the treatment of internalizing disorders, will be given.
Acquisition et interaction en langue étrangère, 2002
Note des auteurs : Nous remercions les évaluateurs de cet article pour la qualité et la pertinenc... more Note des auteurs : Nous remercions les évaluateurs de cet article pour la qualité et la pertinence de leurs commentaires. La couleur locale du français L2 des anglo-montréalais Acquisition et interaction en langue étrangère, 17 | 2002
We use a comparative variationist framework to compare variable word-final obstruent devoicing pa... more We use a comparative variationist framework to compare variable word-final obstruent devoicing patterns in heritage Polish, English and homeland Polish in conversational speech. Phonological and lexical factors are shown to condition this variation differently in the three varieties. We have a particular interest in one other factor relevant to heritage speakers: the amount of code-switching between Polish and English by each speaker. We show that, for second generation heritage speakers, individuals’ code-switching rates are positively correlated with their rates of devoicing. Based on the qualitatively and quantitatively different devoicing patterns of heritage Polish speakers, compared to both homeland Polish and Toronto English, we argue that the phonological grammar of this group of speakers constitutes a convergence of the heritage language and the dominant language’s grammars and suggest that frequent codeswitching provides the context in which these speakers’ knowledge of Po...
Heritage language speakers have frequently been reported to have language skills weaker than home... more Heritage language speakers have frequently been reported to have language skills weaker than homeland (monolingual) speakers. For example, Wei and Lee (2001, p. 359), a study of British-born Chinese-English bilingual children’s morphosyntactic patterns (including classifier use), report “evidence of delayed and stagnated L1 development.” However, many studies compare heritage speaker performance to a prescriptive standard rather than to spontaneous speech from homeland speakers. We compare spontaneous speech data from two generations of Heritage Cantonese speakers in Toronto, Canada, and from Homeland Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. Both groups are similar in a strong preference for general and mass classifiers, and classifier choice being primarily governed by the noun’s number. We observe specialization of go3 個 to singular nouns, a grammaticalization process increasing with each generation. The similarity between homeland and heritage patterns replicates previous studies utilizi...
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