The objective of the current study is to contribute to the larger body of sociophonetic variation research by describing and analyzing Spanish as spoken in a small Puerto Rican community in the US. First, I describe phonological and morphosyntactic features of Spanish as used by four different groups of Puerto Rican informants in Amsterdam, New…

This research project sought to explore the influence of English L2 on Spanish L1 in an environment where the L1 (Spanish) is the dominant language. Participants were recruited through voluntary response sampling at the University of Puerto Rico Secondary School (UHS). They completed a language survey on Google Forms that collected general…

The purpose of this study is to validate the following hypothesis: First, spoken accents have a major influence and can affect listeners' personal attitudes and second, native Puerto Rican speakers will speak English as a second language without wanting to sound like a North American English speaker. This study will contribute to research on the…

A great deal of research concerning the acquisition of English morphology as a second language has been carried out in order to explain some typical stages in the acquisition of the English-s morphemes and the difficulty confronted by second language learners. According to Siegel (2003), interlanguage and functional transfer both play a crucial…

This dissertation investigated the speech productions of the implosive -r consonant by U.S.-born Puerto Rican and Dominican Heritage Language Spanish speakers in New York. The following main research questions were addressed: 1) Do heritage language Caribbean Spanish speakers evidence the same variation with the /?/ consonant in the implosive…

This study investigates four aspects of Puerto Rican Spanish as represented in the Autonomous Municipality of Ponce: the behavior of coda /[alveolar flap]/, the behavior of /r/, the different realizations of coda /s/, and its intonational phonology. Previous studies on Puerto Rican Spanish report that coda /[alveolar flap]/ is normally realized as…

Globalization, the Internet, television, and other technological media are all factors that are greatly influencing English learning. Knowing English is no longer considered a luxury, it is even said that whoever does not speak that language would be in a clear situation of disadvantage. Many applications are currently available for users in…

This dissertation investigates lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York. English-origin lexical material was extracted from a stratified sample of 146 Spanish-speaking informants of different ages, national origins, classes, etc., living in New York City. ANOVAs and Pearson correlations determined whether lexical borrowing frequency and the type…

The use of subtractive bilingual models in Puerto Rico may influence children's construction of social categorizations. There is a gap in the literature related to linguistics, ethnicity, and systems of education and acculturation of a majority group. The purpose of this multiple case study was to examine the influence of the language of…

The present study examined the relationship between children's early literacy-related abilities and their reading achievement in late elementary school in the context of a Puerto Rican community in Massachusetts. The researcher examined four years of student achievement test data from the public elementary schools of Holyoke, Massachusetts. The…

The contact between Dominicans and Puerto Ricans is targeted for study as much for its linguistic import as for its social context. Dominican and Puerto Rican Spanish are considered varieties of Caribbean Spanish that differ only by a few phonological and syntactic patterns and a small number of lexical items. Although both varieties are heavily…

Various studies analyzing pronominal subject expression in Spanish have found that switch-reference, the relationship between two consecutive subjects, is the factor that most commonly constrains speakers' choice of a null or explicit subject personal pronoun (SPP) (Cameron, 1995; Flores-Ferran, 2002). When the second subject in a sequence differs…