Bilingualism and Status Attainment among Latinos

Recent research demonstrates that bilingualism is associated with positive educational outcomes. Less is known, however, about its influence on status attainment in young adulthood. In this study, we utilize data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 2000 to examine the influence of bilingualism during adolescence on educational attainment, occupation, and income among Latinos. We find that compared with English dominance, biliteracy is positively associated with high school completion and occupational prestige among Latina women and that oral and passive bilingualism are negatively associated with high school completion among Latino men. We suggest these differences reflect the gendered experiences of language. Spanish‐speaking men may be stigmatized, whereas biliterate women may gain valuable skills that are rewarded in school and in the labor market.     

Latino Children's Integration into American Society: The Dynamics of Bilingual Education

Abstract

The Latino population has grown in recent decades due to increased immigration. This group is largely urban, disproportionately young, and typically enters American society with a low socioeconomic status, which has implications for urban schools. Using data from a three-year investigation of the bilingual education program at Maya Angelou Elementary in Texas, this study examines the integration of Latino students into the educational system. More specifically, I utilize a sociological framework which incorporates structural and sociocultural factors of immigrant adaptation to investigate bilingual education at Angelou and the broader context of educating Latino English Language Learners (ELLs). At Angelou, I find evidence of commitment to bilingualism, yet structural constraints in the school undermine this commitment. However, these challenges are minimal in comparison to the broader policy environment concerning the ELLs' education. On this front, Angelou must confront teacher shortages, scarcity of materials, and high-stakes standardized testing. Conclusions indicate the treatment of Spanish language and Latino culture as subordinate despite the school's efforts to serve their students.     

The Wage Gap between Foreign and Spanish Nationals in Spain: an Analysis Using Matched Employer–Employee Data

In this paper, we analyse wage differences between foreign and Spanish nationals in Spain. This analysis is relevant because Spain has witnessed a sharp increase in the proportion of foreign workers over the past decade. In our analysis, we explicitly account for unobserved heterogeneity at firm level, a situation which occurs when relevant covariates (for example, those connected to a specific firm's production process) are not included in the model because they are unmeasurable, unobservable or unavailable for the researcher. When accounting for such heterogeneity, our results show that wage gaps between foreign nationals from developing countries and Spanish nationals range between ?6.35 per cent and ?11.30 per cent. We also find that wage differences, between Spanish nationals and others in the same firm and job, are substantially greater for almost every group of low‐tenured foreign workers and also for those holding open‐ended contracts.     

Normalizing bilingualism:The effects of the Catalonian linguistic normalization policy one generation after1

This study examines the evolution of language attitudes of linguistically diverse adolescents in urban Catalonia a generation after the instauration of Linguistic Normalization, official language policies favoring Catalan. Woolard (1984, 1989) and Woolard and Gahng's (1990) classic Catalan/Spanish matched guise studies are used as a baseline. Current data come from a modified and expanded replication of those original studies. Findings show: (1) differences in attitudes between youths of Spanish and Catalan background have softened; (2) disparities in Status and Solidarity have evened out; (3) language choice can be highly gendered; and (4) bilingual proficiency is now valued by and for both communities. The support for bilingualism and the easing of divisions are understood as signs of increased ‘linguistic cosmopolitanism,’ a stance that looks beyond parochial own‐group communities and favors bridging linguistic boundaries. The significance is that minority languages can be valued when they take on such symbolic roles.     

Vois‐Tu Le Kem? Do You See the Bos? Foreign Word Learning at 14 Months

How easily can infants regularly exposed to only one language begin to acquire a second one? In three experiments, we tested 14‐month‐old English and French monolingual infants’ ability to learn words presented in foreign language sentence frames. Infants were trained on two novel word‐object pairings and then tested using a preferential looking task. Word forms were phonetically and phonotactically legal in both languages, and cross‐spliced across conditions, so only the sentence frames established the word as native or foreign. In Experiment 1, infants were taught one native and one foreign word and successfully learned both. In Experiment 2 and 3, infants were taught two foreign words, but only showed successful learning of the first word they encountered. These results demonstrate that infants can successfully learn words embedded in foreign language sentences, but this is more challenging than native word learning. More broadly, they show that the sentential context of a novel word, and not just the word form itself, influences infants’ early word learning.     

The Impact of Sound in Modern Multiline Video Slot Machine Play

Slot machine wins and losses have distinctive, measurable, physiological effects on players. The contributing factors to these effects remain under-explored. We believe that sound is one of these key contributing factors. Sound plays an important role in reinforcement, and thus on arousal level and stress response of players. It is the use of sound for positive reinforcement in particular that we believe influences the player. In the current study, we investigate the role that sound plays in psychophysical responses to slot machine play. A total of 96 gamblers played a slot machine simulator with and without sound being paired with reinforcement. Skin conductance responses and heart rate, as well as subjective judgments about the gambling experience were examined. The results showed that the sound influenced the arousal of participants both psychophysically and psychologically. The sound also influenced players’ preferences, with the majority of players preferring to play slot machines that were accompanied by winning sounds. The sounds also caused players to significantly overestimate the number of times they won while playing the slot machine.     

The Accommodation of Conflict in the Merger of Two Religious Denominations

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of migration on the occupational prestige and mobility of about 4000 U.S. men aged 35–64 in 1951. The analysis is based on data from the 1951 Six City Survey of Labor Mobility. The findings show that migrants are superior to non-migrants, with few exceptions, in mean socio-economic statuses. Migrant superiority was due to initial advantages for men 35–44 only. Men over 45 who migrated lost part of their initial advantage relative to non-migrants. The regression slopes describing the relationship among son's education, father's prestige level, and son's 1949 occupational prestige did not differ between migrants and non-migrants. A fairly consistent interaction with age appeared in the data—migrants 45 years and older suffered set-backs in their careers compared to younger migrants.     

Stress Pattern Preference in Spanish‐Learning Infants: The Role of Syllable Weight

As a result of exposure, infants acquire biases that conform to the rhythmic properties of their native language. Previous lexical stress preference studies have shown that English‐ and German‐, but not French‐learning infants, show a bias toward trochaic words. The present study explores Spanish‐learning infants' lexical stress preferential patterns and the role of syllable weight at 9 months of age. Spanish is a syllable‐timed language with no vowel reduction and variable stress. Around 50% of the word types in Spanish are disyllabic, with a superior proportion of trochees than iambs (60% and 40%, respectively). Experiment 1 with CV.CV pseudo‐words failed to reveal a clear trochaic bias in 9‐month‐old Spanish‐learning infants. However, when preference was explored with items containing a heavy syllable (CVC.CV and CV.CVC, respectively), both a trochaic (Experiment 2) and an iambic preference (Experiment 3) could be elicited. These results suggest that knowledge about the close and highly regular link between heavy syllables and stress assignment in Spanish can be easily acquired and determines infants' preference at 9 months of age, while for CV.CV items, the trochaic bias appears to be weak. Our results broaden the current knowledge on the factors that determine the emergence of rhythmic biases.     

Infant‐Directed Prosody Helps Infants Map Sounds to Meanings

Adults typically use an exaggerated, distinctive speaking style when addressing infants. However, the effects of infant‐directed (ID) speech on infants' learning are not yet well understood. This research investigates how ID speech affects how infants perform a key function in language acquisition, associating the sounds of words with their meanings. Seventeen‐month‐old infants were presented with two label‐object pairs in a habituation‐based word learning task. In Experiment 1, the labels were produced in adult‐directed (AD) speech. In Experiment 2, the labels were produced in ID prosody; they had higher pitch, greater pitch variation, and longer durations than the AD labels. We found that infants failed to learn the labels in AD speech, but succeeded in learning the same labels when they were produced in ID speech. Experiment 3 investigated the role of variability in learning from ID speech. When the labels were presented in ID prosody with no variation across tokens, infants failed to learn them. Our findings indicate that ID prosody can affect how readily infants map sounds to meanings and that the variability in prosody that is characteristic of ID speech may play a key role in its effect on learning new words.     

Phonotactic Constraints on Infant Word Learning

How do infants use their knowledge of native language sound patterns when learning words? There is ample evidence of infants’ precocious acquisition of native language sound structure during the first year of life, but much less evidence concerning how they apply this knowledge to the task of associating sounds with meanings in word learning. To address this question, 18‐month‐olds were presented with two phonotactically legal object labels (containing sound sequences that occur frequently in English) or two phonotactically illegal object labels (containing sound sequences that never occur in English), paired with novel objects. Infants were then tested using a looking‐while‐listening measure. The results revealed that infants looked at the correct objects after hearing the legal labels, but not the illegal labels. Furthermore, vocabulary size was related to performance. Infants with larger receptive vocabularies displayed greater differences between learning of legal and illegal labels than infants with smaller vocabularies. These findings provide evidence that infants’ knowledge of native language sound patterns influences their word learning.     

Infants' preference for speech is stable across the first year of life: Meta-analytic evidence

Previous work suggested that humans' sophisticated speech perception abilities stem from an early capacity to pay attention to speech in the auditory environment. What are the roots of this early preference? We assess the extent to which it is due to it being a vocal sound, a natural sound, and a familiar sound through a meta-analytic approach, classifying experiments as a function of whether they used native or foreign speech and whether the competitor, against which preference is tested, was vocal or non-vocal, natural or artificial. We also tested for the effect of age. Synthesizing data from 791 infants across 39 experiments, we found a medium effect size, confirming at the scale of the literature that infants reliably prefer speech over other sounds. This preference was not significantly moderated by the language used, vocal quality, or naturalness of the competitor, nor by infant age. The current body of evidence appears most compatible with the hypothesis that speech is preferred consistently as such and not just due to its vocal, natural, or familiar nature. We discuss limitations of the extant body of work on speech preference, including evidence consistent with a publication bias and low representation of certain stimuli types and ages.     

'Sobre Las Olas': A Mexican Genesis in Borderlands Jazz and the Legacy for Ethnic Studies

Abstract

In 1884 the Mexican government sent a national military band to the Cotton Exposition in New Orleans. When the Fair ended in 1885, several of these musicians remained in the city. By the 1890s, many of New Orleans' and Texas' most promising Black jazz and blues artists were acquiring musical instruction from Mexicano musicians. The evidence presented in this article recalls the centuries-long parallels and meeting points between Black and Mexicano histories of subjugation and resilience, of political suppression and cultural expression, and of the inevitable exchanges that occur through migration and culture among marginalized communities. I argue that the presence of Mexico and Mexicans in the jazz and blues history of the borderlands inspires a reconsideration of relational identities and cultural productions that lie outside the bounds of traditional racial and historical discourses.     

Infants' discrimination of consonant contrasts in the presence and absence of talker variability

To learn speech-sound categories, infants must identify the acoustic dimensions that differentiate categories and selectively attend to them as opposed to irrelevant dimensions. Variability on irrelevant acoustic dimensions can aid formation of robust categories in infants through adults in tasks such as word learning (e.g., Rost and McMurray, 2009) or speech-sound learning (e.g., Lively et al., 1993). At the same time, variability sometimes overwhelms learners, interfering with learning and processing. Two prior studies (Kuhl & Miller, 1982; Jusczyk, Pisoni, & Mullennix, 1992) found that irrelevant variability sometimes impaired early sound discrimination. We asked whether variability would impair or facilitate discrimination for older infants, comparing 7.5-month-old infants' discrimination of an early acquired native contrast, /p/ vs. /b/ (in the word forms /pIm/ vs. /bIm/), in Experiment 1, with an acoustically subtle, non-native contrast, /n/ vs. /ŋ/ (in /nIm/ vs. /ŋIm/), in Experiment 2. Words were spoken by one or four talkers. Infants discriminated the native but not the non-native contrast, and there were no significant effects of talker condition. We discuss implications for theories of phonological learning and avenues for future research.     

Code–convergent borrowing in Louisiana French

The nature of lexical and structural borrowing has been at the forefront of sociolinguistic debates for many years. This study analyzes bilingual lexemes and morphemes of English–origin loanwords from a Louisiana corpus of twenty–two French/English speakers. French Louisiana, however, has been undergoing language shift from French to English for three generations and, as a consequence, language dominance is in a parallel state of shift. This competing dominance produces borrowings characterized by a range of phonological integration coupled with bound morphemes from both languages. These data suggest that examining borrowing beyond the word level reveals a highly complex interplay of often competing and overlapping grammars.     

Discrimination of Large and Small Numerosities by Human Infants

Six experiments investigated infants' sensitivity to numerosity in auditory sequences. In prior studies (Lipton & Spelke, 2003), 6‐month‐old infants discriminated sequences of 8 versus 16 but not 8 versus 12 sounds, and 9‐month‐old infants discriminated 8 versus 12 but not 8 versus 10 sounds, when the continuous variables of rate, sound duration, and sequence duration were controlled. The current studies investigated whether infants' numerical discrimination is subject to the signature ratio limit of adults' numerosity discrimination. Four experiments at 6 and 9 months provided evidence for this signature limit, suggesting that common mechanisms underlie numerosity discrimination in infants and adults. In further experiments, infants failed to discriminate 2 versus 4 or 2 versus 3 sounds when tested under the same conditions as with large numbers. These findings accord with studies using visual‐spatial arrays (e.g., Clearfield & Mix, 1999) and suggest that separate systems underlie infants' representation of small and large numerosities.     

Contextualizing Gender and Migration: Galician Immigration to Switzerland

Focusing on two main aspects of the Spanish‐Galician migration experience, this article attempts to analyze how migrants' actions and discourses are shaped by notions of gender. First, the discourse of returning will question notions of family and how differently men and women define their positions as members of a family. While men seem to link their social identity to immovable goods of prestige back in Galicia, women are able to redefine their social identity as they base it on social relations. The second aspect deals with the fact that cleaning is defined as women's work, but at the same time it is — under certain conditions — performed by men.     

A comparison of the allocation of male and female occupational prestige*

Ce travail cherche à répondre à deux questions: de quel façon le sexe d'un ouvrier influence l'évaluation du prestige professionnel, et quelle est la relation existant entre la composition des sexes par rapport aux occupations, et l'évaluation du prestige professionnel lorsque le sexe des ouvriers est pris en considération. Trois échelles du prestige professionnel (traditionnelle, masculine, féminine) sont créées. Les résultats indiquent des différences dans l'ordre hiérarchique et les niveaux moyens du prestige professionnel masculin et féminin. De plus, la composition par sexe des occupations influence le statut social des occupations de deux façons différentes. This paper is concerned with two questions: how does the sex of the worker influence the evaluation of occupational prestige, and what is the relationship between the sex composition of occupations and the evaluation of occupational prestige when the sex of the worker is taken into consideration? Three occupational prestige scales (traditional, male, and female) are created. The results show differences in both the rank order and mean levels of male and female occupational prestige. In addition the sex composition of occupations is shown to influence the social standing of occupations in two separate ways.     

Can a Click be a Word?: Infants' Learning of Non‐Native Words

Forms that are nonlinguistic markers in one language (i.e., “tsk‐tsk” in English) may be part of the phoneme inventory—and hence part of words—in another language. In the current paper, we demonstrate that infants' ability to learn words containing unfamiliar language sounds is influenced by the age and vocabulary size of the infant learner, as well as by cues to the speaker's referential intent. When referential cues were available, infants at 14 months learned words with non‐native speech sounds, but at 20 months only those infants with smaller vocabularies succeeded. When no referential cues were present, infants at both 14 and 20 months failed to learn the same words. The implications of the relation between linguistic sophistication and non‐native word learning are discussed.     

British and Irish Migration and Integration in Ferrol: A Survey of British and Spanish Documentary Sources

This article documents the participation of British and Irish immigrants in an ambitious programme of naval reform in eighteenth-century Spain. In so doing, it explores their integration in their new host country in the town of Ferrol, located in north-west Spain. This town grew up around the royal dockyard which was established there by the middle of the century. In this period, the government of the Spanish monarchy actively developed a policy to attract and import foreign labour for the dockyards in order to face serious competition with foreign countries, gain supremacy over the seas, defend the country and protect its interests abroad. The migration of technicians and craftsmen from British yards to Ferrol has been often analysed on the basis of foreign experience and technology for the development of the shipbuilding industry but little attention was paid to the internal structure of this immigrant population and to the nature of the motivating factors behind these individuals's decision to move to Spain. Based on this argument, this study addresses the presence of women in this migration process, analyses the incentives for migrating and considers the role of social networks as a channel for migration and integration. These issues have been dealt with using data from primary sources which provide a more complete picture to understand this migration to Ferrol and to study the identification and adaptation of immigrants within their new social and cultural environment.     

Ethnic Penetration Into Toronto'S Elite Structure*

Le pbinomene du degre de la penetration des individus qui ne sont pas d'ascen-dance anglo-saxonne dans les cercles d'elite a Toronto fournit une base pour pre-ciser la notion d'elite. En plus de tenir compte de la position dans la structure du pouvoir et de l'importance fonctionnelle des individus on ajoute le critere de prestige social. On reussit ainsi a distinguer deux differents niveau de statut lies a l'elite. Au niveau inferieur se retrouvent des individus detenant des roles fonc-tionnels cles dans la societe: c'est le niveau des elites strategiques. Au niveau superieur, que Ton nomme l'elite centrale, on retrouve un groupe restreint de personnes qui, en plus de posseder le pouvoir et l'aisance materielle qui accompa-gnent le leadership fonctionnel, sont investies d'un prestige social eleve dans la communaute. Par le biais de cette conception dualiste du statut de l'elite, une analyse de la composition ethnique de la structure des elites a Toronto met en lumiere que les Anglo-Saxons dominent toujours la couche superieure de l'elite. The extent of non-Anglo-Saxon penetration into elite circles in Toronto provides a basis for refining the elite concept. In addition to the usual considerations of power and functional importance, the element of prestige has also been included. Two distinct levels of elite status have been delineated. The lower level consists of persons holding key functional roles in the society, designated as the level of strategic elites. The upper level, termed the core elite, consists of a small group of people who combine high social status in the community with the power and wealth that accompany functional leadership. Utilizing this dual concept of elite status, analysis of the ethnic composition of Toronto's elite structure reveals that the upper level is still dominated by Anglo-Saxons.