Plenary Sessions
Expressing conceptualizations of space across languages and communities: Insights into typology, bilingualism, and child language development
How do speakers conceptualize the location of objects in relation to themselves and others? How do these conceptualizations develop in children, and how do they change when speakers use more than one language? I address these questions through recent research on the use of exophoric demonstratives like este and ese across three bilingual communities: Spanish-English bilinguals in the U.S., and Secoya-Spanish and Ticuna-Spanish bilinguals in the Peruvian Amazon. Demonstratives are an excellent tool for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies because they exist in all languages and emerge early in childhood.
Three main findings are highlighted. First, typological studies have traditionally characterized demonstrative systems as either egocentric, encoding the location of a referent relative to the speaker (e.g., this near me, that farther from me), or sociocentric, also taking the addressee into account (e.g., that near you, this between us). Our recent studies call for a more nuanced typology. We find evidence of sociocentric demonstrative use across communities and languages, including in languages categorized as egocentric; however, sociocentricity is more prominent in systems with larger demonstrative inventories.
Second, children’s demonstrative use indicates that they initially adopt an egocentric conceptualization of space even when the demonstrative system they are learning is sociocentric. Third, adult bilinguals, but not child bilinguals, exhibit conceptual convergence: adults tend to adopt a common strategy for conceptualizing and encoding space across their languages. This finding suggests that conceptual convergence develops as bilingual experience accumulates. Together, these findings show how linguistic structure, language development, and language experience shape the ways speakers conceptualize and encode space, and how bilingual experience can ultimately lead to convergence across languages.
Naomi L. ShinÌýis Professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of New Mexico.ÌýHer research program rests onÌýdefining grammar as a set of probabilistic patterns rather than categorical rules. This approach has guided her research on child language and bilingualism. For example, her investigations into monolingual and bilingual children’s acquisition of morphosyntactic patterns indicate that children attune to distributional tendencies in the input, and that variable patterns emerge first with high-frequency linguistic items. Most of Shin’s bilingualism studies have focused on Spanish-English bilingual communities in the U.S., including child heritage speakers of Spanish, and underscore the complex, structured variation that pervades bilinguals’ grammars. Extending beyond U.S. communities, Shin’s current,Ìýcollaborative, project investigates nominal demonstrative use and conceptualizations of space in bilingual communities in the U.S. and in the Peruvian Amazon. Findings from this project indicate that the interlocutor’s location and attention shape demonstrative use across typologically diverse languages. Other collaborative endeavors include co-directing UNM’s and UNM’s Grand Challenges, both of which are engaged in research on children’s acquisition of minority languages and community outreach efforts promoting bilingualism and tackling linguistic bias in New Mexico. Shin has also developed a sociolinguistic approach to teaching Spanish grammar that culminated in a co-authored textbook. Her editorial work includes serving as an Associate Editor for the journalÌýStudies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, and she will soon be an Action Editor for the journalÌýLanguage Development Research.ÌýShin originally hails from Brooklyn, New York, and she completed her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Supporting Heritage Language Writers: From Peer Interactions to Generative AI
Heritage language (HL) learners often report that writing is the most difficult skill to develop in their HL and that it can be a source of anxiety. These challenges underscore the need for research that can inform pedagogical approaches responsive to HL learners’ writing needs. The first part of this presentation reviews what we know about writing among Spanish–English HL speakers, highlighting recent studies on the role of working memory in pausing and revision processes, as well as in the production of morphological complexity across the heritage (Spanish) and the societal (English) language. The second part examines how pedagogical interventions, including task-based peer interactions and generative AI, can support HL writers’ performance, as measured through features of written products such as subordination and complex noun phrases. The presentation concludes with directions for future research and pedagogical takeaways for supporting HL writers.
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Julio TorresÌýis Professor of Spanish Applied Linguistics & Multilingualism in theÌý with courtesy appointments in theÌýand Department ofÌý at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He directs theÌýand serves as the academic coordinator for the heritage Spanish writing courses at UCI. His research interests include heritage/second language acquisition, multilingualism, cognition, and task-based language learning. His publications have appeared in venues such asÌýStudies in Second Language AcquisitionÌýandÌýThe Modern Language JournalÌýas well as edited volumes and handbooks. He's the co-editor of the 2022 volumeÌýÌýwith Routledge Press. He serves as an Associate Editor of theÌý Professor Torres is the recipient of the 2014 Russell Campbell Young Scholar Special Recognition Award for the field of heritage language education and of theÌý at UCI. He also works as a teacher educator with K-16 teachers/instructors in designing task-based instruction and curriculum for heritage language students.Ìý
Studying variation and change in morphosyntax: Broadening the scope of the variable grammar
It is widely recognized that grammar can be meaningfully analyzed as a variable system that is probabilistically conditioned. Over decades of research, the variationist paradigm has established that this probabilistic conditioning is evidenced in the covariation between linguistic elements, as seen in the relative favoring or disfavoring of a variable form across different contexts. Here, I propose that valuable insights about morphosyntactic variation can be gained by expanding the evidence we draw on to infer the variable grammar to include both theÌývariable context, or the set of environments in which there is actually a choice among competing variants andÌýcontextual distributions, or the relative distribution of competing variants across conditioning environments. Considering the use of a set of variables in spontaneous speech corpora from different Spanish varieties, I demonstrate how these dimensions are relevant for cross-varietal or cross-language comparisons and for reliably identifying grammatical change.Ìý
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Catherine Travis is Professor of Modern European Languages at the Australian National University (ANU). Her research addresses the ways in which linguistic and social factors impact language variation and change, in particular in socially diverse communities. She has conducted large-scale projects applying quantitative methods to spontaneous speech data from English and Spanish, in monolingual and bilingual communities. She is co-author ofÌýBilingualism in the Community: Code-switching and Grammars in Contact (CUP 2018;Ìý), and of 'The intersection of ethnicity and social class in language variation and change’ (LVC 2025;Ìý). She is an Associate Editor (and the Data Article Editor) for theÌýAustralian Journal of Linguistics, and isÌýon the Editorial Board ofÌýLanguage Variation and Change, and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.