Testing Cumulative Lexicalized Effects in Study Abroad: Variable Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish as an Additional Language
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Background
2.1. Study Abroad and Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Variation
2.2. Usage-Based Factors
2.2.1. FRC
2.2.2. Likelihood of SPP Expression
- What role, if any, do usage-based factors (FRC and Likelihood of SPP expression) identified for L1 acquisition play in L2 acquisition of sociolinguistic variation?
- What effects, if any, does SA have on the acquisition of variable first-person subject pronoun for additional language learners of Spanish? Do these effects persist across time?
3. Materials and Methods
3.1. LANGSNAP Corpus
3.2. Data Coding and Analysis
- (1)
- pero uh mi tío es um es(pañol) [//] de España. Y uh sí. Hablo con ellos en español. [speaker 170, Pre-SA]‘but my uncle is from Spain. And yes. I speak Spanish with them’
- (2)
- Tengo amigos mmm con quien hablo en Facebook [speaker 163, Post-SA1]‘I have friends I speak to on Facebook’
- (3)
- y yo creo que yo tengo un nivel bastante bueno [speaker 175, Post-SA1]‘and I believe I have a pretty good level’
- (4)
- sé que las podría haber conocido [speaker 166, Post-SA1]‘I know that I could have met them’
4. Results
4.1. Rates of SPP Expression and SA
4.2. Acquisition of SPP Expression and Usage-Based Factors
5. Discussion
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
Appendix A
Random Effect | Variance | Std. Dev. | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Verb (intercept) | 0.4923 | 0.7017 | |||
Speaker (intercept) | 0.9715 | 0.9857 | |||
Fixed effects | N | % overt | Estimate coef. | Std. error | p-value |
(Intercept) | −3.011 | 1.256 | * | ||
Switch-reference (switch) | 1018 | 11.5 | 0.782 | 0.162 | *** |
Switch-reference (no switch) | 1383 | 5.9 | -- | -- | |
Timing (Pre-SA) | 1323 | 7.2 | −0.190 | 0.165 | ** |
Immediate Post-SA1 | 1078 | 9.6 | -- | -- | |
Priming (previous expressed) | 548 | 11.3 | 0.696 | 0.290 | * |
(previous null) | 1853 | 7.4 | -- | -- | |
Log Likelihood SPP expression | -- | -- | 1.847 | 1.007 | . |
Log Verb Frequency | -- | -- | 0.366 | 0.256 | n.s. |
Log FRC_switch | -- | -- | 2.473 | 2.527 | n.s. |
1 | We did the runs we report without the Polish and English/Polish participants. The model selected the same factors as significant as well as the same directions of effects in the non-significant factors. We therefore choose to keep the data obtained from these speakers in the final version. |
2 | None of these speaker characteristics significantly predict subject pronoun variation in these data. |
3 | Although this corpus also provides abundant written data, both from the twentieth century and for earlier stages of the language, for our calculations we rely exclusively on the oral section, which contains approximately 5 million words of spoken Spanish from different varieties of Latin America and Spain. |
4 | For more details, see E. L. Brown and Shin (2022). |
5 | The Friedman Test is a non-parametric test used for non-normally distributed data and is an alternative to the one-way ANOVA. |
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n | % SPP Expression | |
---|---|---|
Pre-SA | 1323 | 7.2 |
Post-SA1 | 1078 | 9.6 |
Post-SA2 | 1117 | 8.0 |
Total | 3518 | 8.3 |
Random Effect | Variance | Std. Dev. | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Verb (intercept) | 0.5236 | 0.7236 | |||
Speaker (intercept) | 1.0106 | 1.0053 | |||
Fixed effects | N | % overt | Estimate coef. | Std. error | p-value |
(Intercept) | −2.3314 | 1.2801 | |||
Switch-reference (switch) | 1018 | 11.5 | 0.778 | 0.163 | <0.001 |
Switch-reference (no switch) | 1383 | 5.9 | -- | -- | |
Timing (Pre-SA) | 1323 | 7.2 | −1.860 | 0.567 | 0.001 |
Immediate Post-SA1 | 1078 | 9.6 | -- | -- | |
Priming (previous expressed) | 548 | 11.3 | 0.673 | 0.293 | 0.022 |
(previous null) | 1853 | 7.4 | -- | -- | |
Log Likelihood SPP expression | -- | -- | 3.214 | 1.123 | 0.004 |
Log Verb Frequency | -- | -- | 0.369 | 0.257 | 0.151 |
Log FRC_switch | -- | -- | 2.181 | 2.560 | 0.394 |
Log Likelihood SPP expression X Timing (pre-SA) | -- | -- | −2.903 | 0.945 | 0.002 |
Random Effect | Variance | Std. Dev. | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Verb (intercept) | 0.3142 | 0.5606 | |||
Speaker (intercept) | 1.2982 | 1.1394 | |||
Fixed effects | n | % overt | Estimate coef. | Std. error | p-value |
(Intercept) | −2.0275 | 0.595 | |||
Switch-reference (switch) | 882 | 11.1 | 0.701 | 0.168 | <0.001 |
Switch-reference (no switch) | 1313 | 7.2 | -- | -- | |
Timing (Delayed Post-SA2) | 1117 | 8.0 | 0.071 | 0.566 | 0.901 |
Immediate Post-SA1 | 1078 | 9.7 | -- | -- | |
Priming (previous expressed) | 109 | 19.3 | 0.448 | 0.288 | 0.112 |
(previous null) | 2086 | 8.3 | -- | -- | |
Log Likelihood SPP expression | -- | -- | 2.273 | 0.997 | 0.023 |
Log Likelihood SPP expression X Timing (delayed-SA) | -- | -- | 0.234 | 1.002 | 0.815 |
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Brown, E.; Quan, T.; Rivas, J. Testing Cumulative Lexicalized Effects in Study Abroad: Variable Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish as an Additional Language. Languages 2025, 10, 110. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10050110
Brown E, Quan T, Rivas J. Testing Cumulative Lexicalized Effects in Study Abroad: Variable Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish as an Additional Language. Languages. 2025; 10(5):110. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10050110
Chicago/Turabian StyleBrown, Esther, Tracy Quan, and Javier Rivas. 2025. "Testing Cumulative Lexicalized Effects in Study Abroad: Variable Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish as an Additional Language" Languages 10, no. 5: 110. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10050110
APA StyleBrown, E., Quan, T., & Rivas, J. (2025). Testing Cumulative Lexicalized Effects in Study Abroad: Variable Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish as an Additional Language. Languages, 10(5), 110. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10050110