This dissertation centers on the study of Kaqchikel word associations and the social variation that exists within them. Theoretical and methodological considerations for this project stem from the fields of psycholinguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics. Together, these form an approach that fits within a blossoming…

As critical approaches to Heritage Language (HL) instruction are increasingly more widespread, it is now more pertinent than ever to conduct research on Spanish linguistic variation that reveals systematicity and refutes hegemonic notions of 'incorrectness'. This variationist study examines the use and distribution of the Preterite and Imperfect…

Traditionally, Basque has three voiceless affricates that are different in their place of articulation. More precisely, affricates can have a lamino-alveolar, apico-alveolar, and prepalatal place of articulation and the graphemes used to represent them are respectively. Likewise, Basque has been described as having three fricatives with the same…

Studies assessing the grammatical knowledge of speakers of Spanish as a heritage language have largely focused on the Spanish subjunctive mood and have concluded, almost unanimously, that heritage speakers' knowledge of the Spanish subjunctive is non-native-like and subject to incomplete acquisition. However, there is also evidence that while…

Muysken's article is a timely call for us to seek deeper regularities in the bewildering diversity of language contact outcomes. His model provocatively suggests that most such outcomes can be subsumed under four speaker optimization strategies. I consider two aspects of the proposal here: the formalization in Optimality Theory (OT) and the…

This dissertation explores Spanish nominal plural formation from a morphophonological perspective. The primary objective is to better understand heritage bilinguals' (HBs') phonological categorization of the morphological element of number in their heritage language. This is done by way of picture-naming elicitation tasks of consonant-final nouns…

In this article the way bilinguals handle differing semantic categories in their two languages will be investigated. Drawing on bilingual data from multilingual speakers of Romansh as well as from speakers of (Swiss) German, the tensions that emerge from "conflicting habits" in the two languages are analyzed in the semantic domain of…

This study provides the first systematic account of word-final cluster acquisition in bilingual children. To this end, forty Welsh-English bilingual children differing in language dominance and age (2;6 to 5;0) participated in a picture-naming task in English and Welsh. The results revealed significant age and dominance effects on cluster…

Research methodology is determined by theoretical approaches. This article discusses methods of multilingualism research in connection with theoretical developments in linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and education. Taking a brief glance at the past, the article starts with a discussion of an issue underlying the choice of…

This qualitative sociolinguistic research study examines Latino/a students' use of language in a science classroom and laboratory. This study was conducted in a school in the southwestern United States that serves an economically depressed, predominantly Latino population. The object of study was a 5th-grade bilingual (Spanish/English) class. The…

First language (L1) attrition research focuses on syntactic and morphological deterioration in environments where L1 "attriters" rarely have contact with their L1, such as immigrants. There is no study that investigates L1 attrition in tones and in contexts where L1 can still be often heard. This study examines this attrition type in…

Two-year-old bilingual children can show sensitivity to the language choice of their interlocutor, but do not necessarily achieve perfect separation by discourse context, e.g. speaking only French with a French interlocutor; dominance in one language is often cited as a reason for this. In this study we asked whether older bilingual preschoolers…

This paper describes multiple Estonian-Russian language contacts in Estonia. For synchronic microsociolinguistic research it is usual to concentrate on the impact of a sociolinguistically dominant language A on an immigrant/minority language B. In the Soviet setting, the dominant language was usually Russian (despite Russians being a minority).…

The stability of an ethnic minority's language in a bilingual situation is viewed as a function of: (1) level of literacy in each of the two languages; (2) economic, social, and political power as related to the two languages; (3) geographic and social mobility; (4) social integration within each language group and across groups; (5) amount and…

Discusses intergenerational language shift as a function of intra- and intergroup relations, focusing on patterns of linguistic and ethnic intermarriage. Analyzes 1976 Survey of Income and Education data and concludes that, in the United States, non-English languages disappear between generations as social interaction widens to include…