
Naomi Lapidus ShinUniversity of New Mexico | UNM · Department of Linguistics
Naomi Lapidus Shin
PhD
About
75
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Introduction
Naomi Lapidus Shin is currently Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of New Mexico.
Additional affiliations
August 2012 - present
August 2006 - May 2012
September 2000 - May 2003
Publications
Publications (75)
Constraints on linguistic variation are consistent across adult speakers, yielding probabilistic and systematic patterns. Yet, little is known about the development of such patterns during childhood. This study investigates Spanish subject pronoun expression in naturalistic data from 154 monolingual children in Mexico, divided into four age groups:...
This study investigates 37 child heritage speakers' direct object (DO) clitics in Spanish. Results from a production task show that DO expression versus omission was related to Spanish vocabulary: the lower the vocabulary score, the more omitted DOs. In contrast, DO clitic gender was related to English: children who used more English in the home an...
This paper adopts a cognitive linguistic framework to explore the
influence of spatial and social factors on the use of Spanish demonstratives
esta ‘this’ and esa ‘that’. Twenty adult Spanish speakers in Monterrey, Mexico,
were asked questions prompting the selection of puzzle pieces for placement in
a 25-piece puzzle located in the shared space be...
In a puzzle completion task designed to elicit demonstratives, Spanish-speaking children and adults directed an experimenter to select puzzle pieces differing in location and in shared focus of attention. Three to five-year-old children were not all sensitive to referent location when selecting a demonstrative. By contrast, six to eight-year-old ch...
This article presents a developmental pathway for the acquisition of morphosyntactic variation. Although there is abundant evidence that morphosyntactic variation is pervasive among adults, much less is known about how children acquire such variation. The literature thus far indicates that the pathway of development involves first producing only on...
The limited research on bilinguals’ demonstratives suggests that bilingualism may result in a reduced number of demonstrative forms in bilinguals’ linguistic systems as well as a shift in the factors that constrain demonstrative usage. The current study investigates Spanish nominal demonstrative use among Spanish-speaking monolingual adults in Mexi...
This volume connects the latest research on language acquisition across the lifespan with the explanation of language change in specific sociohistorical settings. This conversation benefits from recent advances in two areas: on the one hand, the study of how learners of various ages and in various sociolinguistic contexts acquire language variation...
This study investigates child heritage speakers’ Spanish direct objects. A task designed to elicit direct objects was completed in Spanish and English by 40 child heritage speakers of Spanish in the U.S., and in Spanish by 24 monolingual children in Mexico. Both participant groups varied their direct object forms, following the same ranking: clitic...
OPEN ACCESS! https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/lnc3.12480
Research on heritage language development in children can profit greatly by incorporating insights from analyses of structured variation, which is defined as the interchange of linguistic forms where the choice to use one form over the other is probabilistically condi...
This study explores variable Spanish subject pronoun expression (e.g., yo veo ~ veo ) in Spanish-English speaking children in different regions of the United States (U.S.): Los Angeles (LA), California, and the Tri-Cities area of the state of Washington. We also compare the U.S. children to monolingual Spanish-speaking children in Mexico. Binary lo...
OPEN ACCESS. Download from IJB website: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13670069221124475
Objectives
This study investigates the influence of lexical knowledge, progressive aspect, and verb type on bilingual children’s direct object expression in Spanish.
Methodology
Sixty-one child heritage speakers of Spanish, ages 3;3-8;8, and 10...
What explains variation in human language? How are linguistic and social factors related? How do we examine possible semantic differences between variants? These questions and many more are explored in this volume, which examines syntactic variables in a range of languages. It brings together a team of internationally acclaimed authors to provide p...
Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency
effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to
significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child
language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a
particular discour...
Download here: https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/shl/article/view/1150
Scholars have argued that restricted language input slows language acquisition, but the pathway of development may remain the same. The current study investigated the influence of amount of Spanish input on Spanish demonstrative usage among 19 U.S. child heritage speakers, ages 3...
The Interface Hypothesis predicts that syntax-discourse interface features are acquired later than features involving the interface between syntax and other components of grammar. The Frequency Hypothesis predicts that frequent grammatical patterns are acquired earlier than infrequent ones. This study tests these hypotheses by examining Spanish sub...
Este capítulo explora como el input reducido y la influencia interlingüística afectan el desarrollo morfosintáctico de los niños que hablan español como lengua de herencia (ELH). Para ello, se resumen varias investigaciones recientes sobre la concordancia del género, la marcación diferencial del objeto, la morfología verbal, las preposiciones colga...
This chapter investigates pre- and post-verbal subject placement in Spanish, as in la rana entró ~ entró la rana (‘the frog entered’), in a corpus of Spanish spoken by 24 monolingual children in Mexico, ages 6;3-8;5. The results show that the postverbal position was likelier when the subjects (i) were lexical rather than pronominal, (ii) occurred i...
How do production and comprehension processes interact in the bilingual brain during language interaction? Most experimental and theoretical research in psycholinguistics to date has focused on investigating the mechanisms that underlie language production and language comprehension separately. Only recently have researchers started emphasizing the...
Abstract
Objectives: This study investigates (i) whether child heritage speakers produce more gender mismatches in Spanish (un piedra ‘a-masc. stone-fem.’) than monolingual children, (ii) whether older child heritage speakers mismatch more than younger ones, and (iii) the linguistic contexts in which mismatches occur.
Methodology: 3,893 gender agr...
Naomi L. Shin is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Hispanic Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. Her primary interests include child language acquisition, bilingualism, language contact, and sociolinguistics. Her research focuses on patterns of morphosyntactic variation, examining how these patterns are acquired during childhood and...
In a puzzle completion task designed to elicit demonstratives, Spanish-speaking children and adults directed an experimenter to select puzzle pieces differing in location and in shared focus of attention. Three to five-year-old children were not all sensitive to referent location when selecting a demonstrative. By contrast, six to eight-year-old ch...
American Sign Language (ASL) makes extensive use of pointing signs, but there has been only limited documentation of how pointing signs are used for demonstrative functions. We elicited demonstratives from four adult Deaf signers of ASL in a puzzle completion task. Our preliminary analysis of the demonstratives produced by these signers supports th...
Across the world, professional linguistic inquiry is in full bloom, largely as result of pioneering thinkers who helped rapidly modernize the study of human language in the last century. As the field continues to move forward, further solidifying its position as a conduit of insight into the human condition, it is essential to take stock of the the...
Gramática española: Variación social introduces intermediate to advanced students of Spanish to the main grammatical features of the language in a way that emphasizes the social underpinnings of language.
Written entirely in Spanish, this unique approach to the study of grammar guides students in an examination of how Spanish grammar varies depend...
New Mexico's unique linguistic and ethnic heritage is the result of a complex history of colonization characterized by oppression. This chapter examines how, in this context of oppression, New Mexican Spanish speakers negotiate ethnic identities through bilingual talk-in-interaction. The study takes an ethnomethodological approach to identity as so...
The primary aim of the chapter is to extract broad generalizations from the literature, to interpret those generalizations within current theories of language acquisition and bilingualism. In particular, two questions are explored:
1. Do child heritage speakers and monolingual children acquire Spanish morphosyntax at the same rate?
2. Do child he...
This study addresses whether monolingual and bilingual Spanish-speaking children differ in their acquisition of grammar by examining direct object clitic placement in children’s narratives. Specifically, we analyze contexts where either proclisis or enclisis is possible (Lo voy a ver ~ Voy a verlo). Corpus studies of adult monolingual Spanish show...
Advanced grammar courses often present standardized grammar rules to students without considering sociolinguistic variation. As a result, many native/heritage students feel that they speak “incorrectly,” and many second language learners do not get an accurate picture of the target language's real-world grammar. This article describes and evaluates...
This study addresses whether monolingual and bilingual Spanish-speaking children differ in their acquisition of grammar by examining direct object clitic placement in children's narratives. Specifically, we analyze contexts where either proclisis or enclisis is possible (Lo voy a ver ~ Voy a verlo). Corpus studies of adult monolingual Spanish show...
IN THE STUDY OF Spanish as it is spoken in the United States, much interest has focused on the question of cross-generational continuity and change. For the layperson and the scholar alike, it is natural to wonder whether and to what extent the language of US-born Latinos resembles that of their Latin America–born parents and grandparents. For scho...
Latinos are the fastest growing minority group in the United States and will likely represent a third of the population by 2050 (Passel & Cohn, 2008). Presently, 36% of U.S. Latinos are English-Spanish bilinguals (Krogstad & González-Barrera, 2015), and the majority of kindergarten students who are dual language learners are Latino. Young Spanish-s...
It has been suggested that contact between Spanish and English results in an increased rate of Spanish subject pronouns and a desensitization to factors that constrain pronoun usage. Yet, evidence for such contact-induced change has been found in some U.S. communities, but not others. In this study we analyze Spanish pronoun expression in interview...
This book explores the current state of Spanish sociolinguistics and its contribution to theories of language variation and change, from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It offers original analyses on a variety of topics across a wide spectrum of linguistic subfields from different formal, experimental, and corpus-based standpoints. The...
http://press.georgetown.edu/book/languages/subject-pronoun-expression-spanish
Adults’ variable use of grammatical structures is highly systematic (e.g. Labov 1994). Yet, we know very little about how or when the variable use of morphosyntactic structures develops during childhood. The current study begins to address this lacuna in the literature by investigating overt versus null subject pronoun expression (e.g. yo bailo ~ b...
In the growing field of address research, Spanish emerges as one of the most complex Indo European languages. Firstly, it presents second person variation in its nominal, pronominal, and verbal systems. Moreover, several Spanish varieties have more than two address variants, which compete and mix in intricate ways. Forms of Address in the Spanish o...
This study provides evidence of grammatical complexification, operationalized as the emergence of a significant linguistic constraint on the use of a linguistic structure, in Spanish spoken in New York City (NYC). Analyses of 4,276 third person singular (3sg) verbs produced in sociolinguistic interviews with first-generation Latin American immigran...
The role of English in shaping U.S. Spanish is widely debated. Evidence for English influence has been found in New York where greater familiarity with English correlates with changes in subject pronoun use (Otheguy and Zentella, 2012). The present study further examines the impact of English by studying divergent contexts, where pronoun omission i...
Washington State, demographically speaking, represents the northernmost boundary, la nueva frontera, of what might now be called the Spanish speaking West. Previously, Spanish speakers in the West were concentrated mostly in the Southwest. However, in recent years the Hispanic population of the U.S. has steadily grown, with the result that it forms...
The role of English in shaping US Spanish is widely debated. Evidence for English influence has been found in New York where greater familiarity with English correlates with changes in subject pronoun use (Otheguy & Zentella 2012). The present study further examines the impact of English by studying divergent contexts, where pronoun omission is com...
This study examines the role of social class and gender in an ongoing change in Spanish spoken in New York City (NYC). The change, which has to do with increasing use of Spanish subject pronouns, is correlated with increased exposure to life in NYC and to English. Our investigation of six different national-origin groups shows a connection between...
It is well known that women lead language change in monolingual settings, but this women effect has not been thoroughly investigated for bilingual settings where factors such as language contact come into play. This study examines an ongoing change in Spanish spoken in New York City (NYC) having to do with the alternation between expression and omi...
Lexical frequency clearly plays a role in shaping the developing grammar, as frequent forms are acquired earlier and processed more easily than infrequent forms (Ellis 2012, Lieven 2010). Nevertheless, little is known about how frequency affects morphosyntactic variation during acquisition. This study examines the influence of frequency of verb for...
To investigate the development of the NP selection process, preferences for overt or null Spanish subject pronouns were elicited from 139 children (5;09 to 15;08) and 30 adults in Mexico. Participants were told stories in which consecutive grammatical subjects shared the same referent (same-reference), or did not (switch-reference). In the stories,...
The alternation between overt and null subject personal pronouns (SPPs) has been widely researched in various populations of Spanish-speakers, including adult monolinguals, bilinguals, and second language learners of Spanish. Very few studies have investigated this variable syntactic phenomenon in monolingual first language (L1) acquisition of Span...
Previous research on language mixing has revealed similarities in written and oral production with respect to syntactic and pragmatic patterns (e.g. Callahan 2004). In this study we find, however, that the two modes of expression diverge in loanword gender assignment. English-origin NPs inserted into written Spanish discourse (e.g.
un baggie
) were...
One manifestation of a general drive for efficiency in communication is the tendency to shorten high-frequency words and phrases. In situations of language contact, the drive for efficient communication is intensified. The demonstration of efficiency hinges on the simple observation that not all the words of a receiving language are displaced, and...
Previous studies have shown that some of the probabilistic discourse-pragmatic predictors of overt and null subject pronouns are subject to erosion In this study we investigate the 'Continuity of reference variable' (Continuity). This variable refers to whether a verb maintains the same subject as the previous verb or changes it. Overt subject pron...
In general Spanish, references to nonspecific third-person plurals are usually made by means of a verb occurring with the null form of the subject pronoun, as in llamaron del banco, rather than by means of a verb occurring with the overt form of the subject pronoun. In contrast to the position in this discussion, the literature presents null pronou...
Twenty-one articles from the 31st LSRL investigate cutting-edge issues and interfaces across phonology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, semantics, and syntax in multiple dialects of such Romance languages as Catalan, French, Creole French, and Spanish, both old and modern. Research in Romance phonology moves from the quantitative and synchronic to co...