This paper provides the first evidence of maternal speech--motherese--in Wichi, an indigenous language with a complex morphology spoken in the Gran Chaco region of Argentina. The corpus consists of 22 hours of video recordings from the daily life of three children, starting from their one-morpheme utterance period (MLU = 1) to the onset of…

A remarkable example of Spanish-Italian contact is the Spanish variety spoken in Buenos Aires (Porteño), which is said to be prosodically "Italianized" due to migration-induced contact. The change in Porteño prosody has been interpreted as a result of transfer from the first language (L1) that occurred when Italian immigrants learned…

Using evidence from first-hand experimental work and existing studies, Colantoni and Gurlekian take a tentative but encouraging step towards exploring the role of contact in explaining intonational change. Their central question is whether Buenos Aires Spanish intonation is distinctive relative to other varieties of Spanish; and if so, whether…