publications

2023

1. RANLP

   Was That a Question? Automatic Classification of Discourse Meaning in Spanish

   Santiago Arróniz, and Sandra Kübler

   In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, 2023

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   This paper examines the effectiveness of different feature representations of audio data in accurately classifying discourse meaning in Spanish. The task involves determining whether an utterance is a declarative sentence, an interrogative, an imperative, etc. We explore how pitch contour can be represented for a discourse-meaning classification task, employing three different audio features: MFCCs, Mel-scale spectrograms, and chromagrams. We also determine if utilizing means is more effective in representing the speech signal, given the large number of coefficients produced during the feature extraction process. Finally, we evaluate whether these feature representation techniques are sensitive to speaker information. Our results show that a recurrent neural network architecture in conjunction with all three feature sets yields the best results for the task.

2. PWPL

   Was That a Question?: Andalusian and Puerto Rican Spanish Listeners and the Perception of Final Fall Terminal Contours (FFTC)

   Santiago Arróniz, and Erik W Willis

   In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV 44), 2023

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   This study examines how variable intonational contours are (mis)interpreted in two different Spanish dialects, Western Andalusian (Henriksen and Amaya 2012) and Puerto Rican Spanish (Armstrong 2010). We seek to investigate how listeners from both dialects interpret the sentence meaning of declaratives, broad focus interrogatives and counter-expectational interrogatives using pitch as the only phonological cue. To do that, two speakers from Puerto Rico and one speaker from Seville, Spain, produced the stimuli for the different perception experiments based on the contours documented in the Interactive Atlas of Spanish Intonation (Prieto and Roseano 2010). An utterance type selection task and a declarative to interrogative continuum judgment task were created from these utterances. Both tasks were presented through the Qualtrics platform to 57 Puerto Rican listeners and 35 Andalusian listeners. The findings indicated that both groups could identify declarative contours as declaratives. Both interrogative types of Puerto Rican contours were consistently identified as interrogatives by the Puerto Ricans listeners. Andalusian listeners were less certain recognizing broad focus interrogatives as a question. Counter-expectational contours were recognized as declaratives by Andalusian listeners. Results indicate that specific intonation patterns can be interpreted differently based on Spanish dialect and may result in the misinterpretation of the utterance.

2022

1. EJHR

   Joke identification, comprehension and appreciation by Spanish intermediate ESL learners: an exploratory study

   Santiago Arróniz Parra, and Manuel Padilla Cruz

   The European Journal of Humour Research, Apr 2022

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   This paper reports on an exploratory study examining joke identification, appreciation and comprehension by Spanish intermediate ESL learners. The study is based on a relevance-theoretic classification of jokes, which assumes that humorousness results from manipulation of three parametres: make-sense frames, cultural information and utterance interpretation. It firstly ascertains whether Spanish ESL learners recognise orally-delivered samples of seven types of purportedly jocular texts. Secondly, it examines whether these learners actually regard such texts as comical and why. Finally, it looks into the learners’ interpretative problems in order to single out which joke type(s) is/are more challenging. The study relies on quantitative and qualitative data elicited through an online questionnaire comprising four tasks. The results indicate no correlation between joke identification and appreciation, and independence of successful joke recognition from sophisticated interpretative skills. Jokes involving invalidation of an activated make-sense frame were most easily identified and found most funny, but jokes exploiting cancellation of an initial, seemingly plausible, interpretation posed more difficulties.

2021

1. IULCWP

   Who’s motivated to trill?: A sociolinguistic study on the acquisition of Spanish trills in heterosyllabic sequences

   Santiago Arróniz, and Mackenzie Dawn Coulter-Kern

   IULC Working Papers, Apr 2021

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   This study aims to investigate the acquisition of trills in heterosyllabic sequences by speakers of Spanish as a second language (L2) and heritage speakers. To this end, we presented participants with three oral production tasks designed to elicit instances of trills, accompanied by a motivation questionnaire and a background questionnaire. The results obtained by means of acoustic analysis of the productions together with the answers to the motivation questionnaire show clear acquisitional patterns in L2 learners of Spanish at varying levels of proficiency, as well as variation in native speakers’ production of the trill in heterosyllabic sequences. This paper also raises some pedagogical implications, pointing out that instructors should more explicitly teach and illustrate examples of trills in heterosyllabic sequences at all levels, since this phenomenon is neither orthographically salient nor frequent in speech.

2. IULCWP

   Teaching Responses to Invitations through Face-To-Face & Computer-Mediated Communication in the Spanish Classroom.

   Mackenzie Dawn Coulter-Kern, and Santiago Arróniz

   IULC Working Papers, Apr 2021

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   While it is known that increasing learner awareness of pragmatics can lead to cross cultural communication, and that pedagogical intervention can improve learners’ cultural awareness of pragmatics, there remains little explicit instruction on formulaic pragmatic expressions in Spanish. The present unit of instruction provides teachers and learners with an activity to teach acceptances and refusals in Spanish through the use of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). It utilizes Scollon and Scollon’s (2001) model of politeness which incorporates the notion of ‘self’ when teaching acceptances and refusals to invitations.

2020

1. Manuscript

   Computer-Assisted Language Learning: Testing Morphological Structures in L2 Spanish.

   Santiago Arróniz

   Apr 2020
2. Manuscript

   Intonation and attitudes: Examining language attitudes toward Catalan by Peninsular Spanish speakers.

   Santiago Arróniz

   Apr 2020

   Abs

   Research on language attitudes toward certain community groups is extensive and covers a wide range of phenomena and languages. This paper aims to investigate whether intonation, as a prosodic component and, frequently, a distinctive feature of certain languages, can trigger different attitudes, depending on whether or not the identity of the speaker is disclosed. To this end, a group of ten speakers of peninsular Spanish participated in a perception study in which pitch modifications were used with a synthetic voice to reflect intonation contours specific to neutral polar questions and information-seeking wh-questions in two languages in contact: Spanish and Catalan. The participants heard two versions of each token, both of them in Spanish, but one with a Castilian-accented L+H* intonation, and the other with a Catalan-accented H+L* intonation. Subsequently, they heard the same audio recordings once again, but this time the place of origin of each manipulation was disclosed; that is, either from Madrid (Castilian) or Catalonia (Catalan). The results confirm not only that intonation is a linguistic trait that does trigger attitudes on its own, but also that there is a strong social dimension to how Spanish speakers perceive Catalan, beyond language.

3. Manuscript

   High, or super-high, that is the question: Examining the role of pitch range in Peninsular Spanish

   Santiago Arróniz

   Apr 2020

2019

1. M.A. Thesis

   Joke Comprehesion by Spanish B2 level learners of English: A preliminary empirical study.

   Santiago Arróniz

   Apr 2019

   Abs HTML

   This work undertakes an empirical study of one of the least researched issues in interlanguage pragmatics so far: comprehension of jokes by Spanish learners of English as a second language (L2, henceforth). It seeks to examine whether these learners grasp the humor some joking texts are intended to produce, which types of jokes prove to be more difficult to understand and why. Adopting a relevance-theoretic perspective on comprehension, and, more precisely, the model of comprehension envisaged in the cognitive-pragmatic framework put forward by Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), this work relies on the classification of jokes recently proposed by Yus (2016), where jokes are sorted out into seven different types depending on three parameters which are purportedly exploited by humorists in their creation and are, therefore, responsible for their triggering the expected effect. Consequently, this work presents the results obtained through an online questionnaire that was administered to students of English as an L2 with an upperintermediate, B2 level who were enrolled in one of the compulsory courses of the Degree in English Studies taught at the Universidad de Sevilla. Owing to its limitations, this work cannot but be considered an initial, exploratory study that aims to spark off further research contributing to a better and deeper understanding of the problems that L2 learners may face when processing humorous texts.

2. Manuscript

   The acquisition of intonation by L2 Spanish students (Proposal).

   Santiago Arróniz

   Apr 2019

2018

1. Manuscript

   Intonational Patterns and Perception: A Contrastive Analysis between Peninsular and Puerto Rican Spanish.

   Santiago Arróniz

   Apr 2018
2. Manuscript

   Inovação linguística na poesia de Mário de Sá-Carneiro.

   Santiago Arróniz

   Apr 2018

   Abs

   O objetivo do presente estudo é partir do poema “Como eu não possuo” para dar uma aproximação formal e linguística à poesia de Sá-Carneiro, e aprofundar na maneira em que o autor não só elege as palavras que melhor convêm-lhe, mas que também pode trocar estruturas morfológicas presumidamente estabelecidas na língua para dar um significado diferente. Pretendemos fazer uma análise da estrutura morfológica de certos vocábulos poéticos contextualizando este poema dentro da sua obra e do movimento modernista que destaca de maneira sobressaliente neste autor.

3. Manuscript

   Impoliteness strategies in the L2 classroom setting: Conventionalized formulaic sequences in Spanish.

   Santiago Arróniz

   Apr 2018

   Abs

   The present study aims to investigate the acquisition of impoliteness formulaic sequences in Spanish as a second language in the classroom setting. For those purposes, we want to observe the number of impolite expressions that students at different levels of proficiency know, and if they can use them in context. We will use two different tasks in our study. The first one is a recognition task, based in Bardovi-Harlig and Bastos (2010). With this instrument, we aim to see if students can recognize impolite formulas. In the second task, a production task, we used an oral DCT with 12 different situations, and for each of them, we ask the students to provide an oral response. We will analyze the data obtained with these two instruments and categorize the productions according to Culpeper’s (2011, 2017) taxonomy of conventionalized impolite expressions. We propose that because students are not very familiar with this type of language, a pedagogical intervention could be proposed in a future study to include these expressions in the L2 Spanish classroom.

2017

1. Manuscript

   A study of the production of trills after heterosyllabic consonants in non-native Spanish learners.

   S. Arróniz, and M. Coulter-Kern

   Apr 2017

   Abs

   The present study attempts to 1) identify significant differences in the acquisition of trills by non-native Spanish speakers after heterosyllabic consonants and 2) present these differences quantitatively. This study is primarily concerned with at what point in acquisition do learners begin to produce trills after heterosyllabic consonants and how can we measure their progress as related to productions of a native speaker.

2. Manuscript

   Africación de los grupos /st/, /kt/ y /pt/: Una evolución de la postaspiración en Andalucía.

   Santiago Arróniz

   Apr 2017
3. Manuscript

   Fortición de la consonante palatal sonora: Un estudio explotatorio.

   Santiago Arróniz, and Mackenzie Dawn Coulter-Kern

   Apr 2017

2016

1. Manuscript

   Aspiración de /s/ en Posición Inicial de Sílaba: Un Estudio Sociolingüístico en el Habla Regional del Sur de España.

   Santiago Arróniz

   Apr 2016
2. Manuscript

   Giving response to gratitude expressions in bilingual contexts: A contrastive analysis between American English and Spanish.

   Santiago Arróniz

   Apr 2016

   Abs

   The current study sets out to investigate variation in the speech act of responding to gratitude expression among bilingual speakers. It has been proposed in previous studies (Schneider, 2005; Bieswanger, 2015) that in this particular speech act there can be a variety of strategies that monolingual speakers use to respond to thanks, but no focus has been put in an English-Spanish bilingual community. In this sense, the present research starts from those studies, and looks for the differences or similarities that may occur between bilingual and monolingual speakers. In order to do so, the first thing to consider is the norm in both languages, and then have a look at what really happens in a bilingual context. For this purpose, a DCT was spread among monolingual Spanish speakers to obtain their norm, and then, together with the norm in English obtained in previous research (Schneider, 2005; Bieswanger, 2015), compare both using natural data collected in a bilingual context. Overall, the results obtained from the data collected proved that there are some differences in fact in the way bilingual speakers behave when responding to thanks, showing an accommodation/assimilation to their L2, using strategies that were more common among the opposite community.