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“Language Differentiation and Generational Effects on Yes/No Question Intonation in Palenquero/Spanish Bilinguals”

Friday, March 28, 2025
9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.
Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library
“Language Differentiation and Generational Effects on Yes/No Question Intonation in Palenquero/Spanish Bilinguals”
The Center for Language Science Speaker Series presents Wílmar López-Barrios

This study explores whether Palenquero/Spanish bilinguals keep their languages intonationally distinct in yes/no questions. Recent findings suggest that these speakers could still maintain some degree of temporal and intonational differentiation between their languages. They tend to produce flat or plateau-shaped intonation as well as penultimate lengthening, in Palenquero, and initial rises followed by steeper declinations as well as a more reduced penultimate lengthening, in Spanish. Unlike the elderly, young adults do not exhibit temporal distinctions at the right edge of statements. However, straightforward evidence is still scarce, and it is unclear to what extent these speakers differentiate their languages at the prosodic level. Using Functional Principal Component Analysis along with linear regression analyses, we have studied yes/no questions uttered by Palenquero/Spanish bilinguals, in two unilingual discourse completion tasks. Our results show that young adults are more sensitive to the stress pattern associated with the final word, while elderly speakers tend to produce final intonation language-specifically. Thus, young adults behave in a way similar to other Spanish speakers in the Caribbean, whereas elderly speakers, in contrast, seem to have overgeneralized the truncation rule of Caribbean Spanish yes/no questions. Therefore, most of their Spanish questions end in a “truncated” way.

Screenshot-2025-03-20-165813
Screenshot-2025-03-20-165813
Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library