IDENTITY AND CODE-SWITCHING: A SOCIOPHONETIC STUDY OF BILINGUALS OF MEXICAN HERITAGE

Abstract

The objective of the present study is to analyze word-initial voice onset time (VOT) in the context of code-switching (CS). More specifically, this study combines research methods from sociolinguistics and phonetics to investigate how 32 heritage Spanish speakers (HSSs) of Mexican descent, living in Indiana, produce VOT for /p t k/ in word-initial stops in CS contexts. There is a scarcity of work in his area and by adopting a sociophonetic approach the investigation provides new insights into the phonological system of bilingual speakers. The methodology included four tasks: a demographic and language attitudes questionnaire, a reading task, an image naming task, and an opinion task. A total of 4,608 tokens were analyzed, for which several crosstabulations and logistic regressions were run in R. Participants’ VOT values were compared to their perceptions of their heritage identity, their language use, and their language attitudes. The present study advances the field of sociophonetics regarding the existing understanding of five main topics. First, it shows that for the community of heritage Spanish speakers that live in Indiana, the most relevant variable that predicts the type of VOT production seems to be switch direction. According to the results, switching to Spanish promotes shorter, Spanish-like VOT, and switching to English promotes longer, English-like VOT, supporting Bullock et al. (2006), Piccinini & Arvaniti (2015), Olson (2016), and Ronquest (2016). Second, the results show that there is a higher variability of VOT in the image naming task. Third, the results show that the amount of Spanish and CS used, as well as the languages spoken by the participants’ parents, are related to production. Fourth, the results indicate that participants’ attitudes toward CS are mostly neutral in Indiana, and they are not related to VOT. Lastly, the results show that the higher use of CS, as part of translanguaging, does not hinder the resemblance of phonetic production of /p t k/ VOT to monolingual parameters. The results suggest that the use of CS as part of the pedagogical approach of translanguaging in the classroom may be beneficial.