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THE DEVELOPMENT OF A REGIONAL PHONOLOGICAL FEATURE DURING A SEMESTER ABROAD IN ARGENTINA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2020

Rebecca Pozzi Open the ORCID record for Rebecca Pozzi [Opens in a new window]  and
Robert Bayley Open the ORCID record for Robert Bayley [Opens in a new window]
Rebecca Pozzi*
Affiliation:
California State University, Monterey Bay
Robert Bayley
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Rebecca Pozzi, School of World Languages and Cultures, California State University, Monterey Bay, 100 Campus Center, Seaside, CA 93955. E-mail: rpozzi@csumb.edu.
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Abstract

Although recent research suggests that gains are made in the acquisition of dialectal features during study abroad, the few studies that have been conducted on this topic in Spanish-speaking contexts have focused primarily on features characteristic of Spain. This article examines the L2 acquisition of phonological features characteristic of Buenos Aires Spanish, [ʃ] and [ʒ], known as sheísmo/zheísmo, for example the pronunciation of llave [ʝaβe] “key” as [ʃaβe] or [ʒaβe]. Participants include 23 learners of Spanish studying in Buenos Aires, Argentina. More than 4,800 tokens were gathered before, during, and at the end of the semester using sociolinguistic interviews, a reading passage, and a word list. These data were analyzed for the influence of linguistic and social factors using mixed-effects logistic regression (Rbrul; Johnson, 2009). Results suggest that participants approximate nativelike norms of use of these features and that time in country is a statistically significant predictor of patterns of phonological variation.

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Type
Research Article
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Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 109 - 132
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their close reading and invaluable suggestions regarding this article.

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