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This presentation explores the integration of Critical Community Engagement (CCE) within the first-year Spanish language sequence at the University of Denver. While community engagement is often deferred until students achieve advanced proficiency, this curriculum demonstrates that novice-level learners can engage in meaningful, justice-oriented work that fosters the sustainability of local minority language communities. By grounding the introductory curriculum in the history of the Chicano movement and local Hispanic heritage, the course adopts an asset-based approach that highlights the cultural wealth and existing resources of the community rather than viewing marginalized groups through a deficit lens.

A central component of this sequence is a letter-writing project where students correspond with either detainees in ICE facilities or Spanish-speaking elders. This practice enables beginning students to move beyond the classroom and use Spanish immediately as a tool for social change, addressing structural causes of inequality—such as linguistic isolation and the impacts of detention—while developing their own intercultural competence. By centering community-identified needs and fostering reciprocity, the project transforms the novice classroom into a site of genuine collaboration. This pedagogical shift ensures that the "Connections" made are ethically grounded, encouraging students to reflect on their own positionality and privilege from the very start of their linguistic journey. Ultimately, this session argues that CCE is not only possible but essential at the earliest stages of university-level instruction to sustain the vitality of Spanish programs.

The second presentation builds on the importance of intentionally incorporating Critical Community Engagement (CCE) in university-level language instruction. Specifically, this talk explores how to leverage CCE at the intermediate level to facilitate community connections, develop confidence in linguistic proficiency and participate in a service-learning project. We argue that CCE complements more traditional proficiency goals by empowering students to navigate real-world encounters and flexibility during specific tasks.

Students complete cumulative final projects in the three-part, second-year series designed to interrogate intrinsic motivations, explore community connections and build relationships beyond the classroom. Central to these projects is the understanding of Spanish as a local, living language. In the third course, they complete a volunteer shift with We Don’t Waste, a non-profit dedicated to reducing food waste and distributing goods to the community at no cost. During their shift, each student must rely on their emergent bilingual abilities to help community members with the intake process in English or Spanish. Despite previous CCE coursework, students are often reluctant to use Spanish in the “real world” and with “real Spanish speakers”. However, through careful pre-service reflections and in the controlled, task-focused setting of the market, they feel empowered by their own abilities to navigate and adapt to new information, as well as communicate successfully with community members. Indeed, the CCE coursework at this level encourages students to view their own bilingualism as a dynamic and evolving process that challenges hierarchical ideologies of when or how they can engage with their communities.

This third presentation contextualizes four years of interdisciplinary efforts among Spanish faculty to build partnerships with community organizations — including non-profits, government and educational offices, community organizers as well as private companies — that advance the well-being of Spanish-speaking communities in the Denver Metro area. These partnerships offer advanced undergraduate bilingual students the opportunity to engage critically and first-hand with issues related to the Public Good, while leveraging their bilingual profiles to illustrate career pathways that marry critical language awareness with diverse academic pursuits.��

The experience is structured as a 10-week course providing curricular, intellectual, and professional support as students complete an internship. Students are matched through an intentional process with community partners that align with their academic profiles — combining Spanish with another discipline — and whose mission reflects students' professional aspirations. Drawing on frameworks in critical service-learning, critical language awareness, and applied sociolinguistics, students reflect on their own positionality and its implications for social justice, equity, and linguistic diversity as they engage at their internship sites.��

Because students are expected to mobilize their Spanish language skills as a core component of the experience, and because critical reflection positions this professional opportunity as a vehicle for social change, the course becomes more than an internship support structure. It becomes a curricular pathway in which students not only find professional inspiration, but see themselves as legitimate contributors to the communities and social transformations they envision.

La adquisición de una segunda lengua está profundamente influenciada por la identidad. En español, la variabilidad refleja no solo reglas gramaticales, sino también variaciones regionales, jerarquías sociales y dinámicas interpersonales y pragmáticas. Así pues, los estudiantes de Español como Lengua Extranjera (ELE) tienen la posibilidad de ajustar su uso lingüístico con sus identidades personales e imaginadas dentro de las comunidades hispanohablantes.

Este estudio busca explorar la manera en la cual dichos estudiantes entienden, configuran y usan estos Pronombres de Tratamiento (PdT) en el aula de clase, y en qué medida sus identidades como estudiantes de L2, así como sus comunidades imaginadas, influyen en su variabilidad. De esta manera, se analizaron 14 libros de texto de ELE, se observaron las dinámicas conversaciones y discursivas de dos aulas de clases en Estados Unidos (una de nivel secundario y otra universitaria), y se aplicaron cuestionarios y entrevistas a siete estudiantes universitarios.

Los resultados revelan una dependencia constante de los marcos tradicionales de poder/solidaridad en los libros de texto, con escasa atención a la variación regional. En las interacciones en el aula, los estudiantes mostraron una fuerte preferencia por el uso de tú, independientemente del contexto o nivel de formalidad. Este patrón fue consistente entre los distintos grupos de edad y tipos de interacción. Si bien los estudiantes manifestaron estar conscientes de la distinción entre registros formal e informal, sus elecciones pronominales estuvieron más alineadas con sus motivaciones para aprender español y con su integración imaginada en comunidades hispanas dentro de los Estados Unidos, donde predomina el uso de tú.

Este estudio analiza la adquisición de las formas de segunda persona singular (2PS: tú, usted, vos) en el español de Medellín por parte de aprendientes de español como segunda lengua (L2) de origen angloparlante residentes en Colombia. Mediante una tarea de Completación de Discurso (DCT) y una de Preferencia Contextualizada (CPT), se evaluaron tanto la producción como la interpretación de estas formas en diez aprendientes avanzados y trece hablantes nativos de Medellín.

Los resultados mostraron una producción mínima del vos por parte de los aprendientes (~2%), quienes tendieron a sobre extender tú (77%) y a usar usted en menor proporción (21%). En contraste, los hablantes nativos emplearon una distribución más equilibrada entre tú (54%), usted (38%) y vos (8%). En la tarea de interpretación, los aprendientes mostraron mayor preferencia por tú (57%) y usted (40%), pero también una ligera preferencia por vos en contextos de queja, lo que sugiere cierta conciencia pragmática subyacente. Factores como la competencia en español y el grado de familiaridad con el interlocutor influyeron en la elección de tú y usted, pero no en el uso de vos.

En conjunto, los hallazgos evidencian que, aun en contextos de inmersión, los aprendientes L2 enfrentan serias dificultades para adquirir el voseo, probablemente debido a la falta de instrucción formal, su bajo grado de frecuencia en el input y su fuerte asociación con la identidad local. Estos resultados aportan evidencia al debate sobre la adquisición de la competencia pragmática en L2 y resaltan la necesidad de integrar la variación sociolingüística en la enseñanza del español.

Investigamos las propiedades léxicas y discursivas utilizadas por hablantes de español como segunda lengua en un contexto de estudios en el extranjero en Medellín, Colombia, y las comparamos con las de los hablantes nativos de español de Medellín. Conocido como español paisa, este dialecto sudamericano se caracteriza por un sistema tripartito de las formas de tratamiento de segunda persona singular (2PS). Los participantes fueron 22 estudiantes de español que vivían en Medellín. Se trataba de un grupo heterogéneo procedente de diversos países. Los datos se obtuvieron mediante una tarea de completamiento de discurso (DCT) diseñada para obtener 2PS en diferentes contextos de actos de habla. Posteriormente, los datos se procesaron para extraer el perfil léxico en forma de secuencias de tokens (por ejemplo, unigramas y bigramas), una puntuación de sofisticación léxica basada en el nivel de competencia1 y varios indicadores sintácticos de complejidad a nivel de oración (por ejemplo, número medio de verbos, cláusulas y unidades T). La primera medida del uso de 2PS encontró muy pocos casos de voseo en las respuestas de la DCT (n=6). Por el contrario, los resultados generales mostraron una mayor complejidad sintáctica y varias colocaciones asociadas al discurso de 2PS específico en estudiantes avanzados, que se asemeja a los patrones observados en hablantes nativos de español paisa examinados en investigaciones anteriores2. Los resultados de esta investigación pusieron de manifiesto las etapas de desarrollo de los estudiantes de L2 y la adquisición de la variación dialectal de 2PS adquirida en el contexto de los estudios en el extranjero.

Voseo is defined as the pronominal use of vos and its morphological forms. This form of address has been reported to occur in “two thirds of the Latin American Spanish-speaking countries” (Angulo, 2009, p. 267). Its use can be national or regional (Benavides, 2003) and it carries much variation in its morphology across dialects. All this variation creates a complexity for its teaching. Therefore, this pronoun and its verbal conjugations in L2 and Heritage Spanish (HS) classrooms have been limited during instruction as well as in textbooks and teaching materials. The impact of omitting this topic becomes clear when students struggle abroad in voseante countries like Costa Rica and Argentina because they never learned about voseo. (Shenk 2014; Mason & Nicely, 1995). The presence of this feature in the HS classroom through Critical Language Awareness (Beaudrie and Loza, 2022) allows students to expand their dialectal knowledge as well as validating students’ home dialects. This paper addresses the 2PS variation reality and discusses essential issues that explain, but do not justify, its low or no presence in Spanish instruction while proposing ways to successfully teach voseo scaffolding to the proficiency levels. I also discuss its geographic distribution to introduce its unique variation considering the ladder of language proficiency and offer alternatives to make voseo, as it is a language reality, accessible to L2 and HS learners. At the same time, I present the benefits of its teaching offering students and instructors a guided learning experience of voseo and its variation. All in all, this contribution aims to encourage editors, publishing houses, and instructors to recognize the relevance of shedding light on this underrepresented pronominal feature in the curriculum.

Code-switching, the alternation of two or more languages within the same exchange, has long been a focal point in research on bi/multilingualism. Studies have consistently demonstrated that code-switching patterns are systematic (Poplack, 1980), but it has also been shown that they are shaped by community norms and speaker-specific factors (Deuchar, 2020). Much of the evidence for these claims has come from studies of spontaneous oral production, where code-switching primarily occurs, especially in informal interactions. By comparison, less is known about code-switching patterns in the written modality, despite the increasing popularity of language technologies and the widespread use of messaging services. In this talk, I discuss what evidence from online, informal written production can reveal about linguistic integration in the bilingual mind, focusing on morphosyntactic and discourse patterns. First, I review evidence from English-Spanish bilinguals from two distinct communities in the United States who completed a written map task in an online environment, following a monolingual pilot (Berríos et al., 2023). I also draw on comparable findings from studies that used either the same map task (Geckt et al., 2025) or a different map task (Beatty-Martínez & Dussias, 2017) with bilingual populations. Second, I discuss how the results support usage-based accounts of grammar building (Bybee, 2006; Goldberg, 2024), particularly in relation to how repeated exposure to certain linguistic patterns may contribute to sharedness or distinctness. I conclude with recommendations and methodological considerations for continuing research in this area and for building connections within Hispanic linguistics and with allied fields.

This study sheds light on linguistic sharedness and distinctness in the bilingual mind by investigating whether Spanish-English bilinguals maintain language-specific syllabification routines or develop patterns reflecting cross-language interaction. Syllabification offers a useful window into this question given Spanish-English differences in syllabic structure and organization, particularly in the treatment of intervocalic consonants. This study examined how L1 phonology and L2 proficiency shape intuitions about L1 and L2 syllabification. Seventy-four L1 English–L2 Spanish learners and fifty-four L1 Spanish–L2 English learners completed two auditory syllable judgment tasks, in Spanish and English, in which they identified the first and last syllable of spoken words. Results revealed an asymmetry across groups. L1 Spanish–L2 English learners exhibited highly categorical CV-favoring parsing in both tasks, extending Spanish syllabification patterns to both Spanish and English words. In contrast, L1 English–L2 Spanish learners showed variability and frequent ambisyllabicity in English but more CV-oriented parsing in Spanish.

The observed patterns are compatible with models of bilingual speech learning in which cross- language interaction and language-specific differentiation may coexist (e.g., Escudero, 2005; Flege, 1995). Specifically, syllabic routines may be available across languages but differentially weighted depending on language background, task demands, and L2 experience. Importantly, increased L2 Spanish proficiency was associated with reduced ambisyllabicity and increased CV-oriented syllabification in Spanish, suggesting that increased experience with the L2 strengthens language-specific routines over time. Together, these findings suggest that bilingual syllabification is dynamically organized, with the degree of integration shaped by L1 phonology, L2 experience, and the relative restrictiveness of the syllabic patterns being learned.

Our contribution to this panel examines different frameworks of how bilingual knowledge is represented, focusing on the phenomenon of code-switching. Building on Muntendam and Parafita Couto (2024), we discuss different approaches to code-switching, arguing that the study of information structure –how speakers organize and highlight information within discourse, including focus, givenness, topic, and contrast– provides a particularly appropriate test case to evaluate how these frameworks conceptualize what is shared and what is distinct across language representations in the bilingual mind. We depart from constraint-based theories as discussed by Lipski (1978), Plaff (1979), Poplack (1980) and Myers-Scotton (1993; Myers-Scotton & Jake, 2000), which provide code-switching-specific constraints. We also discuss formal approaches to bilingual organization, including MacSwan’s Minimalist approach (van Gelderen & MacSwan, 2008) and López’s (2020) Bilingual Grammar, which argue that code-switching should not require special grammatical machinery, such that bilingual and monolingual utterances should be explained using the same principles.

We then discuss why information structure offers a particularly relevant domain to consider bilingual organization and bring these theoretical perspectives into dialogue. These perspectives are often based on examples without context and do not consider the information structure of the utterances in which the code-switches appear– a situation we view as a missed opportunity. Taking the case of Spanish-English bilinguals, we show that information structure can be marked via prosodic and morphosyntactic means in ways that can help us understand how universal, probabilistic, and discourse factors interact in real-time language use. This approach will increase our understanding of shared morphosyntax and prosody.

Following Flores & Snape’s (2025) proposal and Putnam & Natvig’s (2025), this presentation outlines three components of a dynamic model of fluctuation (understood as the changes in production and receptive skills exhibited by bi/multilinguals when input and interaction in one or more of their languages are reduced) and re-stabilization (the potential recovery of such skills). These include: a) the notion of alignments as storage units with features from different language components (Sánchez 2019) that guide parsing (Sánchez & Putnam 2026); b) socially-modulated individual factors such as language identity and engagement (Marshall 2026); and c) cognitive factors that underlie access and activation of links between abstract syntactic and semantic features and their morphological and phonological expressions. In a dynamic model of fluctuation and re-stabilization among bilinguals, the last two factors interact and affect the stability of the alignments. In such a model, fluctuation can be the result of not only a lack of input in the language in which skills are fluctuating, but also the result of the interaction between lower levels of engagement with that language and a reduction in the frequency and intensity of activation for production and receptive skills, which may or may not be overcome by cognitive factors such as inhibitory control (Santacruz et al 2026). Re-stabilization occurs when the process of reduction is reversed, with higher levels of engagement, frequency, and activation recovered.

This study considers elicited production of Spanish articles, clitics, and subject/verb agreement in the preterit to determine whether these inflections can serve as markers of developmental language disorder (DLD). These structures all involve agreement, a domain that is susceptible both under DLD and crosslinguistic influence. Therefore, studying agreement inflection in the context of bilingualism and DLD can establish what could constitute disability within the linguistic diversity of U.S. Spanish (Oetting, 2018). 116 children (ages 4;0-6;11) were divided into four groups: 33 bilinguals with DLD (BL-DLD), 33 bilinguals with typical development (BL-TD), 25 monolinguals with DLD (ML-DLD), and 25 monolinguals with typical development (ML-TD).

Results (see Figures 1-2), supported through logistic regression, indicate that target-like production of clitics and verbal agreement distinguished between typical and atypical populations regardless of bilingualism. Clitic omissions were more frequent in children with DLD regardless of bilingualism and therefore mark atypicality. We appeal to generative accounts of feature underspecification (Borer & Rohrbacher, 2002), discourse sensitivity (Grinstead et al., 2009), and possibly Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993). However, we acknowledge the statistical mechanisms at play, arguing for a theoretical “middle ground” in
interpreting our data. We problematize interpretations of our data that strictly involve a single innatist theory. On a practical level, our data contribute to a disability within difference framework (Oetting, 2018) that can develop a fine-grained understanding of what linguistically diverse children produce under situations of atypical development. This aims to fulfill the linguistic rights of child Spanish heritage speakers.

This paper shows how experimental methods can probe phonological representations, by tying together the results of three perception experiments and acoustic analysis. The case study is an ongoing change in Sevillian Spanish that reorders gestures in /sC/ sequences. When /s/ + voiceless stop sequences undergo this process, the result is metathesis from [hC] to [Ch] (/kasko/ > [ka.kho]). Given that these [Ch] sequences in Sevillian are acoustically similar to phonologically aspirated stops in other languages, how can we tell if their abstract representation has changed from that of a consonant cluster into that of an aspirated stop?

The three perception experiments with Sevillian listeners test complementary questions about representation and phonological processes. The results suggest that (1) [Ch] sequences are still represented as a cluster of /s/ + /ptk/; (2) metathesis does not interact with other phonological processes; (3) Sevillians rely on lexical information for accurate perception of [Ch] sequences. Thus, the representation of Sevillian [Ch] sequences has not changed into that of an aspirated stop. I also discuss acoustic data from these sequences, using voice quality trajectories to investigate the alignment of [h] in relation to the stop. Production data reflects abstract representations indirectly and constrains them: the representations and processes must be able to generate observed surface forms. Taken together, the perception and production results from Sevillian suggest that these phonological representations have multiple levels, that gestural timing is constrained to—but free within—a phonologically-specified window (even across lexical words), and that phonological and lexical representations interact.

An issue in the study of sound system is whether specific phenomena of variation in the realization of phonemes should be analyzed in terms of discrete allophones or as gradience in the phonetic implementation of acoustic features or articulatory gestures. In recent years, some phonologists have made the claim that many phenomena that had traditionally been analyzed as phonological rules of allophony are in fact gradual phonetic processes (Katz 2021, Liberman 2018).

Spanish spirantization was traditionally understood as complementary distribution between allophones, but more recent work has argued instead for its analysis as a phonetic phenomenon (Mascaró 1991, etc.). In this view, lenition is gradient and a consequence of reduction in duration where stops do not reach their target. Hualde (2025) presents several arguments for preserving the view where each of the phonemes /b d g/ has two distinct targets: stop and approximant (but where the degree of constriction of continuous allophones is predictable in part by contextual factors). Here we examine this hypothesis. In our planned experiment, participants are asked to read words (a) separating by syllables and (b) putting them together (e.g. la-ca-de-na, la cadena). Stops are predicted in (a) and approximants in (b). In another, crucial condition the target word receives corrective focus (e.g. No he dicho la materia, he dicho la madera). Our hypothesis is that this will result in longer and more constricted approximants, but not stops, since the target for intervocalic /bdg/ is not a stop (against the strictly phonetic analysis).

This study examines the perception of the palatal nasal /ɲ/ in Argentine Spanish, focusing on how phonological contrast is maintained — or lost — given the widespread realization of /ɲ/ as a nasal-plus-glide sequence in this variety (Bongiovanni 2021). Twenty Argentine and twenty Spanish listeners, recruited through Prolific, completed three perception tasks — a phoneme monitoring task, an oddity discrimination task, and a grapheme-cued identification task — using stimuli recorded by a female native speaker of Mexican Spanish that showed clear acoustic differentiation between the two categories.

Results revealed systematic dialectal differences across all three tasks. In the phoneme monitoring task, Argentine listeners frequently detected /i/ in words containing /ɲ/, consistent with reports of decomposition of the palatal nasal into a nasal-plus-glide sequence in production. Spanish listeners showed the same directional pattern but were significantly more resistant to this effect, correctly rejecting /i/ on most trials. In the oddity task, Argentine listeners showed near-chance discrimination between /ɲ/ and the nasal-plus-glide sequence, whereas Spanish listeners discriminated the contrast robustly. Only when a graphemic cue was provided in the identification task did Argentine performance reach levels comparable to Spanish listeners. Together, these findings mirror previous reports on the production of /ɲ/ in Argentine Spanish, suggesting that the neutralization of this contrast is not confined to the articulatory domain. The perceptual asymmetry between Argentine and Spanish listeners raises questions about the nature of the underlying representation of /ɲ/ in this variety.

/s/-aspiration is one of the most widely studied phonological processes in Spanish (Hualde 2014: 157–162). Attested across numerous dialects, it involves the debuccalization of postvocalic /s/ in coda position (casco [ˈkah.ko]). A distinct process is the aspiration of prevocalic /s/ (la semana [la.heˈma.na]). The fact that dialects exhibiting the latter often show low rates of coda /s/-aspiration suggests that the two processes are not developmentally related.��

A particularly relevant context is the /sr/ cluster, in which /s/ is frequently debuccalized, possibly due to aerodynamic constraints on trill production (Solé 1998). Importantly, this pattern may occur even in dialects that lack substantial rates of coda /s/-aspiration. This study examines the acoustic realization of /sr/ sequences in northwestern Mexican Spanish, a variety that lacks systematic coda /s/-aspiration (yet exhibits variable prevocalic aspiration). Seventeen male speakers produced target items such as las pasas, las masas, and las ramas, alongside corresponding singular forms, yielding 2,448 tokens. Acoustic measures included rhyme duration, voicing, signal-to-noise ratio, and spectral properties of the article-final /s/.��

Adopting a parametric approach, the analysis investigates how contrasts are maintained under lenition, drawing on transphonologization. Two questions guide the study: (i) how /s/ is realized across /sp sm sr/ contexts, and (ii) how plural–singular contrasts are preserved under /s/-weakening. Preliminary results indicate robust /s/ realization before /p/ and /m/, but substantial reduction before /r/, accompanied by compensatory trill lengthening, plausibly preserving the plural–singular contrast. These findings underscore the role of lexical and morphological contrast preservation in the phonological system.