PROFILES
Celia Brown-Blake
Celia Brown-Blake is an attorney-at-law and a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of West Indies, Mona. She holds a Masters of Laws and a PhD in Linguistics. In addition to research in law, she conducts research and is published in language and law. She maintains a keen interests in issues of linguistic rights in societies where Creole languages are spoken.
Rosa Guzzardo Tamargo
My research interests are centered on language processing in bilinguals. I am particularly interested in examining how bilinguals negotiate the presence of two or more languages in a single mind and how knowledge of more than one language impacts the way speakers produce and comprehend each of their languages. My research program takes a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of language by using methodological techniques from linguistics and experimental psycholinguistics.
Most of the research that I have conducted concerns codeswitching (the smooth alternation between two or more languages in a stretch of discourse). I have specifically focused on Spanish-English intrasentential switching, which takes place when speakers shift between their languages within a single phrase or sentence. Because intrasentential switching requires greater simultaneous control of both languages, it provides an ideal testing ground for putative constraints on codeswitching. Most studies have focused on the production of these switches (e.g., Di Sciullo, Muysken, & Singh 1986; Myers-Scotton & Jake, 2000; Pfaff, 1979; Poplack, 1980), but the way in which bilinguals comprehend intrasentential switches has been largely unexplored. However, codeswitching is not simply a production phenomenon; all produced codeswitched structures must, in turn, be processed by the interlocutor’s comprehension system. Therefore, my research is aimed at addressing this gap in the literature by studying how bilinguals comprehend different types of intrasentential codeswitches and examining the relation between bilingual production and comprehension. Specifically, I test a hypothesis from the literature on monolingual sentence processing, which states that exposure to particular types of structures affects the way those structures are comprehended (e.g., Gennari & MacDonald, 2009; Trueswell & Kim, 1998; Wilson & Garnsey, 2009).
For my dissertation, I examined two types of codeswitches: one between estar, the Spanish auxiliary ‘be,’ and an English present participle and one between haber, the Spanish auxiliary ‘have,’ and an English past participle. The purpose was to see if, despite their surface similarities, it was easier for bilinguals to process the first type of switch, which is more frequently found in codeswitching corpora, than the second type of switch, which is very rare. The data were collected using an eye tracker. Participants’ eye movements were recorded as they read codeswitched sentences on a computer screen. The results exhibited clear reading time differences between estar+participle switches and haber+participle switches. The former, more frequent switches were easier for the participants to process than the latter, less frequent type of switches. The findings are congenial with models of language processing in which linguistic experience plays a crucial role in terms of the way language is processed.
To adequately study the comprehension of codeswitched language, it is important to develop ecologically appropriate and effective methodologies that can tap into the mechanisms engaged during the processing of codeswitched text. To this end, another goal of my dissertation was to study the effects of two distinct experimental tasks (i.e., an acceptability judgment task and a comprehension task) and two different experimental techniques (i.e., eye-tracking and self-paced reading). A judgment task and a comprehension task were included because the former provides a means of comparing my findings to linguistic theoretical claims that rely on grammaticality judgments to model competency, while the latter more closely resembles what speakers do in everyday interactions. Results indicated that the two tasks bring about different reading patterns in bilingual participants. When reading for comprehension, they displayed processing difficulties with haber+participle switches compared to estar+participle switches, suggesting that production frequency of the two types of switches is linked to the processing patterns they entail in comprehension. When performing the acceptability judgment task, participants exhibited processing difficulties with both types of switches, such that their reading patterns no longer mirrored natural production patterns. These results suggest that codeswitching findings that hinge solely on judgment data should be re-evaluated. The use of the eye-tracking technique and the self-paced reading technique allows for comparisons of two widely used methods in reading comprehension and contributes to the question of the granularity with which diverse methods can access codeswitching processing costs. Although the eye-tracking technique can provide additional, very detailed measures of early processing, both techniques generate very similar results with respect to total time (the reading measure of later processing). This finding should be considered in laboratories that do not have the means to acquire expensive equipment and, instead, require a more accessible methodology to study codeswitching experimentally.
In my future research, I plan to continue to study the relation between bilingual production and comprehension. I would like to extend the reading comprehension study to an auditory comprehension study, using the visual world paradigm. This will allow direct comparisons between the two modes of comprehension in the context of codeswitching. I am also interested in studying auditory and reading comprehension of other types of Spanish-English codeswitches, such as switches involving modal auxiliary verbs. Finally, I hope to examine other outcomes of language or dialect contact, such as phonetic, lexical, and syntactic changes, as well as intonational innovations.
References
Di Sciullo, A., Muysken, P., & Singh, R. (1986). Government and code-mixing. Journal of Linguistics, 22, 1-24.
Gennari, S. P., & MacDonald, M.C. (2009). Linking production and comprehension processes: The case of relative clauses. Cognition, 111, 1-23.
Myers-Scotton, C., & Jake, J. L. (2000). Testing the 4-M model: An introduction. The International Journal of Bilingualism, 4(1), 1-8.
Pfaff, C. W. (1979). Constraints on language mixing: Intrasentential code-switching and borrowing in Spanish/English. Language, 55(2), 291-318.
Poplack, S. (1980). Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18(7-8), 581-618.
Trueswell, J. C., & Kim, A. E. (1998). How to prune a garden path by nipping it in the bud: Fast priming of verb argument structure. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 102-123.
Wilson, M. P., & Garnsey, S. M. (2009). Making simple sentences hard: Verb bias effects in simple direct object sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 368-392.
Philipp Krämer
Philipp Krämer is researcher at the University of Potsdam with a focus on creolistics and sociolinguistics, variational linguistics and multilingualism, phonology, language policies and ideologies, and the history of philology. His research focuses on the languages of i.a. Overseas France, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, Belgium and Luxemburg, and the Nordic Countries. He studied French linguistics, politics and European law at the Free University of Berlin (Germany) and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Strasbourg (France). He received his PhD with a thesis on the history of French creolistics in the 19th century and its interrelation with racial ideology in the colonial context.
Until 2013, he was a member of the research group “Philology and Racism in the 19th Century” at Potsdam University’s department for Romance studies. He is currently working in the German department as member of a transfer project within the research network “Informationsstruktur.” The project group develops materials for continuing training for teachers in order to minimise effects of stereotypical attitudes towards multilingualism and non-standard varieties of German.
Recent publications include Selected Works from 19th Century Creolistics. Emilio Teza, Thomas Russell, Erik Pontoppidan, Adolpho Coelho. Hamburg: Buske (Ed., 2014); Creole exceptionalism in a historical perspective - from 19th century reflection to a self-conscious discipline, in: Language Sciences 38 (2013): 99-109; Der innere Konflikt in Belgien: Sprache und Politik. Geschichte und Gegenwart der mehrsprachigen Gesellschaft. Saarbrücken: VDM (2010); Rassedenken in der Sprach- und Textreflexion. Kommentierte Grundlagetexte des 19. Jahrhunderts. München: Fink. (Ed. with M.Messling and M. Lenz, to appear).
Nadjah Ríos Villarini Nadjah Ríos Villarini, Associate Professor in the Department of English of the College of General Studies, received her PhD and MA in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. Her academic interests concern issues of language and power, language attitudes, and language planning in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Much of her recent research has focused on Vieques, Puerto Rico and St. Croix. For details about her work as Coordinator of the Diaspora Project, an initiative that involved the documentation of oral histories from bilingual education teachers in St. Croix, visit: http://www.thediasporaproject.org/. She served as Issue Editor (with Dr. Mirerza González) of the Sargasso volume Between Two Shores: Vieques and St. Croix, Historical, Linguistic, and Cultural Relations, (see http://humanidades.uprrp.edu/ingles/pdfs/sargasso/TOC2009-2010,%20II.pdf).
Yolanda Rivera
Yolanda Rivera is Professor in the Department of English in the College of Humanities. She completed her BA at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez, her master's degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her PhD at the University of California-Davis. She has taught at different universities in the US and currently teaches at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras in the English Department's Ph.D. program in Creole languages and literature. She gives courses and supervises graduate student research in numerous areas, including Phonology, Typology, Syntax, and Pidgin and Creole Studies.
Her main areas of research include Creole languages, suprasegmental systems, and the Phonology-Syntax connection. Other areas of inquiry that she has explored include the use of intelligent systems for computer assisted language learning (CALL) and historical linguistics. Her plans include creating web-based corpora for different Creole languages, such as Papiamentu and Saramaccan. Besides her academic pursuits, she enjoys writing poetry, reading on rainy days, and running.
Don E. Walicek
I am currently Assistant Professor of English in the College of General Studies at the University of Puerto Rico. I earned my PhD in English linguistics in the College of Humanities of this institution. I received both my BA (Anthropology) and MA (Latin American Studies, with concentrations in Anthropology and History) from the University of Texas at Austin. My main fields of academic interest are sociolinguistics, sociohistorical linguistics, Creole studies, and language and gender.
Since 2009 I have served as Editor of the Caribbean Studies journal Sargasso, which is published by the Department of English in the College of Humanities. I've edited the following volumes of the journal: Language Rights and Language Policy in the Caribbean (with Dr. Celia Brown-Blake, 2013), Celebrating Caribbean Voices: 25 Interviews (2011), Explorations of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (with Dr. Susanne Mühleisen, 2010), Alternative Identities: Resistance and Belonging (2008), Caribbean Theatre and Cultural Performance (with Dr. Lowell Fiet and Sally Everson, 2005), and Creolistics and Caribbean Languages (2005).
My other publications include articles focusing on the social life of language in Caribbean contexts. Several deal with issues of language and sociohistory as they relate to Anguilla, the most northerly of the Leeward Islands; these include "Trajectories of Cultural Feedback: Alan Lomax in 1962 Anguilla" (University of Curaçao, 2011), "Christianity, Literacy, and Creolization in Nineteenth-Century Anguilla" (University of Curaçao, 2011), "The Founder Principle and Anguilla's Homestead Society" (John Benjamins 2009), and "Focusing in Context: Slavery and Vernacular Norms in Eighteenth-Century Anguilla" (La Torre, 2009). I am also the author of the chapters "Chinese Spanish in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: Documenting Sociohistorical Context" (John Benjamins, 2007), and "Farther South: Speaking American, the Language of Migration in Samaná" (U of Virginia, 2007).
Currently I'm working on a book project about language and social life in Anguilla. I'm interested in using place-specific sociohistorical data from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to construct narratives of Creole languages origins and then looking at these alongside linguists' theories of language origins and genesis.
I have also collaborated with Dr. Manfred Krug (Bamberg University, Germany) on a language documentation project that focuses on the use of English in Puerto Rico. In the future I'd like to develop new projects that involve collaboration with educators, writers, local institutions (libraries, museums, cultural institutions), and community leaders.
Celia Brown-Blake
Celia Brown-Blake is an attorney-at-law and a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of West Indies, Mona. She holds a Masters of Laws and a PhD in Linguistics. In addition to research in law, she conducts research and is published in language and law. She maintains a keen interests in issues of linguistic rights in societies where Creole languages are spoken.
Rosa Guzzardo Tamargo
My research interests are centered on language processing in bilinguals. I am particularly interested in examining how bilinguals negotiate the presence of two or more languages in a single mind and how knowledge of more than one language impacts the way speakers produce and comprehend each of their languages. My research program takes a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of language by using methodological techniques from linguistics and experimental psycholinguistics.
Most of the research that I have conducted concerns codeswitching (the smooth alternation between two or more languages in a stretch of discourse). I have specifically focused on Spanish-English intrasentential switching, which takes place when speakers shift between their languages within a single phrase or sentence. Because intrasentential switching requires greater simultaneous control of both languages, it provides an ideal testing ground for putative constraints on codeswitching. Most studies have focused on the production of these switches (e.g., Di Sciullo, Muysken, & Singh 1986; Myers-Scotton & Jake, 2000; Pfaff, 1979; Poplack, 1980), but the way in which bilinguals comprehend intrasentential switches has been largely unexplored. However, codeswitching is not simply a production phenomenon; all produced codeswitched structures must, in turn, be processed by the interlocutor’s comprehension system. Therefore, my research is aimed at addressing this gap in the literature by studying how bilinguals comprehend different types of intrasentential codeswitches and examining the relation between bilingual production and comprehension. Specifically, I test a hypothesis from the literature on monolingual sentence processing, which states that exposure to particular types of structures affects the way those structures are comprehended (e.g., Gennari & MacDonald, 2009; Trueswell & Kim, 1998; Wilson & Garnsey, 2009).
For my dissertation, I examined two types of codeswitches: one between estar, the Spanish auxiliary ‘be,’ and an English present participle and one between haber, the Spanish auxiliary ‘have,’ and an English past participle. The purpose was to see if, despite their surface similarities, it was easier for bilinguals to process the first type of switch, which is more frequently found in codeswitching corpora, than the second type of switch, which is very rare. The data were collected using an eye tracker. Participants’ eye movements were recorded as they read codeswitched sentences on a computer screen. The results exhibited clear reading time differences between estar+participle switches and haber+participle switches. The former, more frequent switches were easier for the participants to process than the latter, less frequent type of switches. The findings are congenial with models of language processing in which linguistic experience plays a crucial role in terms of the way language is processed.
To adequately study the comprehension of codeswitched language, it is important to develop ecologically appropriate and effective methodologies that can tap into the mechanisms engaged during the processing of codeswitched text. To this end, another goal of my dissertation was to study the effects of two distinct experimental tasks (i.e., an acceptability judgment task and a comprehension task) and two different experimental techniques (i.e., eye-tracking and self-paced reading). A judgment task and a comprehension task were included because the former provides a means of comparing my findings to linguistic theoretical claims that rely on grammaticality judgments to model competency, while the latter more closely resembles what speakers do in everyday interactions. Results indicated that the two tasks bring about different reading patterns in bilingual participants. When reading for comprehension, they displayed processing difficulties with haber+participle switches compared to estar+participle switches, suggesting that production frequency of the two types of switches is linked to the processing patterns they entail in comprehension. When performing the acceptability judgment task, participants exhibited processing difficulties with both types of switches, such that their reading patterns no longer mirrored natural production patterns. These results suggest that codeswitching findings that hinge solely on judgment data should be re-evaluated. The use of the eye-tracking technique and the self-paced reading technique allows for comparisons of two widely used methods in reading comprehension and contributes to the question of the granularity with which diverse methods can access codeswitching processing costs. Although the eye-tracking technique can provide additional, very detailed measures of early processing, both techniques generate very similar results with respect to total time (the reading measure of later processing). This finding should be considered in laboratories that do not have the means to acquire expensive equipment and, instead, require a more accessible methodology to study codeswitching experimentally.
In my future research, I plan to continue to study the relation between bilingual production and comprehension. I would like to extend the reading comprehension study to an auditory comprehension study, using the visual world paradigm. This will allow direct comparisons between the two modes of comprehension in the context of codeswitching. I am also interested in studying auditory and reading comprehension of other types of Spanish-English codeswitches, such as switches involving modal auxiliary verbs. Finally, I hope to examine other outcomes of language or dialect contact, such as phonetic, lexical, and syntactic changes, as well as intonational innovations.
References
Di Sciullo, A., Muysken, P., & Singh, R. (1986). Government and code-mixing. Journal of Linguistics, 22, 1-24.
Gennari, S. P., & MacDonald, M.C. (2009). Linking production and comprehension processes: The case of relative clauses. Cognition, 111, 1-23.
Myers-Scotton, C., & Jake, J. L. (2000). Testing the 4-M model: An introduction. The International Journal of Bilingualism, 4(1), 1-8.
Pfaff, C. W. (1979). Constraints on language mixing: Intrasentential code-switching and borrowing in Spanish/English. Language, 55(2), 291-318.
Poplack, S. (1980). Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics, 18(7-8), 581-618.
Trueswell, J. C., & Kim, A. E. (1998). How to prune a garden path by nipping it in the bud: Fast priming of verb argument structure. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 102-123.
Wilson, M. P., & Garnsey, S. M. (2009). Making simple sentences hard: Verb bias effects in simple direct object sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 368-392.
Philipp Krämer
Philipp Krämer is researcher at the University of Potsdam with a focus on creolistics and sociolinguistics, variational linguistics and multilingualism, phonology, language policies and ideologies, and the history of philology. His research focuses on the languages of i.a. Overseas France, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean, Belgium and Luxemburg, and the Nordic Countries. He studied French linguistics, politics and European law at the Free University of Berlin (Germany) and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Strasbourg (France). He received his PhD with a thesis on the history of French creolistics in the 19th century and its interrelation with racial ideology in the colonial context.
Until 2013, he was a member of the research group “Philology and Racism in the 19th Century” at Potsdam University’s department for Romance studies. He is currently working in the German department as member of a transfer project within the research network “Informationsstruktur.” The project group develops materials for continuing training for teachers in order to minimise effects of stereotypical attitudes towards multilingualism and non-standard varieties of German.
Recent publications include Selected Works from 19th Century Creolistics. Emilio Teza, Thomas Russell, Erik Pontoppidan, Adolpho Coelho. Hamburg: Buske (Ed., 2014); Creole exceptionalism in a historical perspective - from 19th century reflection to a self-conscious discipline, in: Language Sciences 38 (2013): 99-109; Der innere Konflikt in Belgien: Sprache und Politik. Geschichte und Gegenwart der mehrsprachigen Gesellschaft. Saarbrücken: VDM (2010); Rassedenken in der Sprach- und Textreflexion. Kommentierte Grundlagetexte des 19. Jahrhunderts. München: Fink. (Ed. with M.Messling and M. Lenz, to appear).
Nadjah Ríos Villarini Nadjah Ríos Villarini, Associate Professor in the Department of English of the College of General Studies, received her PhD and MA in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. Her academic interests concern issues of language and power, language attitudes, and language planning in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Much of her recent research has focused on Vieques, Puerto Rico and St. Croix. For details about her work as Coordinator of the Diaspora Project, an initiative that involved the documentation of oral histories from bilingual education teachers in St. Croix, visit: http://www.thediasporaproject.org/. She served as Issue Editor (with Dr. Mirerza González) of the Sargasso volume Between Two Shores: Vieques and St. Croix, Historical, Linguistic, and Cultural Relations, (see http://humanidades.uprrp.edu/ingles/pdfs/sargasso/TOC2009-2010,%20II.pdf).
Yolanda Rivera
Yolanda Rivera is Professor in the Department of English in the College of Humanities. She completed her BA at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez, her master's degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her PhD at the University of California-Davis. She has taught at different universities in the US and currently teaches at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras in the English Department's Ph.D. program in Creole languages and literature. She gives courses and supervises graduate student research in numerous areas, including Phonology, Typology, Syntax, and Pidgin and Creole Studies.
Her main areas of research include Creole languages, suprasegmental systems, and the Phonology-Syntax connection. Other areas of inquiry that she has explored include the use of intelligent systems for computer assisted language learning (CALL) and historical linguistics. Her plans include creating web-based corpora for different Creole languages, such as Papiamentu and Saramaccan. Besides her academic pursuits, she enjoys writing poetry, reading on rainy days, and running.
Don E. Walicek
I am currently Assistant Professor of English in the College of General Studies at the University of Puerto Rico. I earned my PhD in English linguistics in the College of Humanities of this institution. I received both my BA (Anthropology) and MA (Latin American Studies, with concentrations in Anthropology and History) from the University of Texas at Austin. My main fields of academic interest are sociolinguistics, sociohistorical linguistics, Creole studies, and language and gender.
Since 2009 I have served as Editor of the Caribbean Studies journal Sargasso, which is published by the Department of English in the College of Humanities. I've edited the following volumes of the journal: Language Rights and Language Policy in the Caribbean (with Dr. Celia Brown-Blake, 2013), Celebrating Caribbean Voices: 25 Interviews (2011), Explorations of Language, Gender, and Sexuality (with Dr. Susanne Mühleisen, 2010), Alternative Identities: Resistance and Belonging (2008), Caribbean Theatre and Cultural Performance (with Dr. Lowell Fiet and Sally Everson, 2005), and Creolistics and Caribbean Languages (2005).
My other publications include articles focusing on the social life of language in Caribbean contexts. Several deal with issues of language and sociohistory as they relate to Anguilla, the most northerly of the Leeward Islands; these include "Trajectories of Cultural Feedback: Alan Lomax in 1962 Anguilla" (University of Curaçao, 2011), "Christianity, Literacy, and Creolization in Nineteenth-Century Anguilla" (University of Curaçao, 2011), "The Founder Principle and Anguilla's Homestead Society" (John Benjamins 2009), and "Focusing in Context: Slavery and Vernacular Norms in Eighteenth-Century Anguilla" (La Torre, 2009). I am also the author of the chapters "Chinese Spanish in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: Documenting Sociohistorical Context" (John Benjamins, 2007), and "Farther South: Speaking American, the Language of Migration in Samaná" (U of Virginia, 2007).
Currently I'm working on a book project about language and social life in Anguilla. I'm interested in using place-specific sociohistorical data from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to construct narratives of Creole languages origins and then looking at these alongside linguists' theories of language origins and genesis.
I have also collaborated with Dr. Manfred Krug (Bamberg University, Germany) on a language documentation project that focuses on the use of English in Puerto Rico. In the future I'd like to develop new projects that involve collaboration with educators, writers, local institutions (libraries, museums, cultural institutions), and community leaders.