Doctoral Dissertation Research: Bilingualism and Spatialization in Spanish and Zapotec

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Graduate student Melanie McComsey (University of California, San Diego), under the guidance of Dr. John B. Haviland, will conduct linguistic and ethnographic research with bilingual children in Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico. The research is an innovative approach to a primary problem of linguistic anthropology, the intersection of language, thinking and behavior. The study will focus on the use of spatial language and gesture by children who are bilingual in Spanish and Juchitán Zapotec. The goal is to understand the effects of language contact on communication about space and the implications of these effects for language change. The project employs methodologies developed to approach the problem of linguistic relativity from the perspective of practice and multimodal interaction rather than "thought." Using a combination of micro-ethnographic observation and tasks to elicit spatial language and gesture, the researchers will collect video data of participants in order to understand (1) whether monolingual Spanish-speaking adults differ from monolingual Zapotec-speaking adults in their conceptualization of spatial concepts (as evidenced by their gestures that accompany speaking); (2) how bilingual children compare to these two groups in their speaking and gesturing about space in each language; and (3) whether semantic or grammatical convergence of the bilingual children's two linguistic systems affects their communicative competence in Zapotec.The proposed research has practical implications for teachers and educational administrators who may use the findings to design educational programs. Projects of language maintenance, revitalization, and bilingual education are currently seeking new approaches and models, and may find the results of this research valuable as it pertains to language acquisition, change and shift. Educators and researchers may discover that socialization practices rather than literacy are more important sites of linguistic and cultural reproduction. In addition, the project will contribute descriptive data on a little-studied language spoken by a minority indigenous group in Mexico, and will involve native Juchiteco research assistants who may benefit from learning about the structure of their language and about linguistic transcription.