Research Symposium

BIO

Valentina Di Domenico is a third‑year undergraduate at Florida State University pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Psychology with a minor in Criminology. She is a UROP Scholar and conducts linguistics research through the Voices of the Andes Lab, where she has examined prosodic variation in Spanish dialects and presented her findings at the FSU Undergraduate Research Symposium. Valentina also a research assistant in the Joiner Lab, where she contributes to projects on suicide risk, eating pathology, and social behavior under the mentorship of Thomas Joiner, Ph.D. Her work includes literature synthesis, and data management across multiple sub‑labs. Originally from Argentina, she plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology.

Voices of The Andes: ​Intonation and Language Contact in Peru and Argentina​

Abstract

In our project Voices of the Andes: Intonation and Language Contact in Peru and Argentina , we
investigated the effect of Quechua-Spanish bilingualism on the intonation of questions elicited
from participants fluent in both Quechua and Spanish in Peru and Argentina. The goal of this
research is to identify which components of one language, in this case Spanish, are influenced by
the features of another language, in this case Quechua, a language which greatly differs in
aspects of morphology and phonology. In conducting this research, we uncover greater insight
into the general patterns which underlie language contact and better understand what features are
able to cross-linguistically influence one another, or even transfer across languages entirely. To
investigate this topic we collected audio recordings of Peruvian and Argentinian people who
were Spanish monolinguals, Quechua monolinguals, and bilinguals. Participants were paired and
played a card game designed to elicit yes-no and information-seeking questions. These
recordings were segmented and analyzed using the programs Praat and ELAN to study the
intonation at the end of the questions asked by participants. It is known that in Quechua,
questions are marked using morphological features instead of with a rising pitch, as in Spanish.
Therefore, we predict that those who are most influenced by Quechua (bilingual speakers) will
ask questions without classical Spanish intonation. Results of this study may have implications
for what we know about culture and language dominance in a post-colonial context, and what
effects these deviances in language have on personal or community differentiation.

Keywords: Linguistics, Spanish, Quechua, intonation