Conceptual transfer: The impact of addressee location on Spanish-English bilinguals' nominal demonstratives

Shin, Naomi and Lease, Sarah (2025) Conceptual transfer: The impact of addressee location on Spanish-English bilinguals' nominal demonstratives. ACTA LINGUISTICA ACADEMICA, 72 (3). pp. 356-385. ISSN 2559-8201

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Abstract

Spanish demonstratives encode speaker-referent and addressee-referent distance, displaying a sociocentric conceptualization of space. By contrast, English demonstratives encode speaker-referent distance, but not addressee-referent distance, reflecting a speaker-based egocentric conceptualization of space. To test the hypothesis that bilinguals transfer the way that space is encoded from one language into another, 41 Spanish-English bilinguals and 19 English-speaking monolinguals completed an elicited production puzzle task in which the addressee’s position was manipulated: the experimenter either sat next to or across from the participant. The bilingual participants comprised two groups: 19 bilinguals who arrived in the U.S. as adults (“Adult Arrivals”) and 22 who were raised in the U.S. (“U.S.-raised”). Mixed-effects binary logistic regressions demonstrate that the Adult Arrivals were more likely to use esta ‘this’ rather than esa ‘that’ when the experimenter was across from rather than next to the participant, displaying a sociocentric conceptualization of space. By contrast, experimenter position did not impact the English monolinguals’ demonstratives. Mirroring the English monolinguals, the U.S.-raised bilinguals’ demonstratives were not conditioned by experimenter position – neither in English nor in Spanish – suggesting that these bilinguals transferred an egocentric conceptualization of space from English into Spanish. The findings contribute to our understanding of how bilingualism affects the cognitive processes invoked when using demonstratives and how age of onset of bilingualism and language dominance mediate such conceptual transfer.

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