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Covariation & Salience in Linguistic Contact
I investigate how the noticeability—or salience—of different linguistic features shapes how people use and adapt language in contexts of contact with other dialects and languages. Instead of analyzing features one by one, I look at how lower- and higher-salience features pattern together to understand when speakers converge toward another language, maintain their own patterns, or repurpose features as identity markers. This approach bridges morphosyntax, phonetics, and discourse, integrating reproducible annotation and quantitative modeling across multiple feature types.
Future work expands this framework by adding more higher-salience variables (e.g., intervocalic /d/ lenition, vowel lowering, prosodic “cantadito”) and by including new communities beyond Boston as well as additional national identity groups. By comparing both speech production and listener perception, I explore when bilingual speakers adapt for efficiency and when they preserve differences as a form of cultural expression.
Dissertation Research
Conducted as part of the Spanish in Boston Project (NSF BCS-1423840), my dissertation examines how lower- and higher-salience features co-vary in the speech of Puerto Rican and Dominican Bostonians. Using mixed-methods analysis, I show that lower-salience features—like subject-pronoun expression, subject placement, and filled pauses—tend to align with English-compatible patterns, while higher-salience features—such as coda /s/ and liquids (/r, ɾ, l/)—remain socially meaningful resources. The results demonstrate that salience—social as much as perceptual—explains which variables shift together and which persist as identity markers. Findings from this project have been presented at various international conferences, including NWAV 51, LSA 2024, and NWAV Miami.
At a glance
Scope: Covariation across morphosyntax (pronouns, word order), discourse (filled pauses), and phonology (coda /s/, liquids).
Design: Sociolinguistic interviews from the Spanish in Boston Corpus plus metalinguistic commentary.
Speakers: Puerto Rican and Dominican speakers (N=22, ≈24,197 tokens)
Methods: Mixed-effects modeling in R
Outcome: A salience-based account of how bilingual speakers balance structural convergence with stylistic distinctiveness.
Key findings:
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Lower-salience features show modest, systematic convergence with English norms (bilingual optimization).
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Higher-salience features remain stable & socially indexed, marking national identity distinctions.
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Salience is continuous and ideologically mediated, structuring which variables shift together and which become identity markers.
Resources
📘 Dissertation (2025)
📄 Article with D. Erker (2024) — early study integrating liquid variation into a broader covariation model
🧾 Coding Manual (Liquids) — segmentation & annotation protocol for /r, ɾ, l/
💾 Reproducible Analysis Repository (R Workflow) — reproducible scripts for data cleaning, modeling, and visualization
Research
Word Order & Information Structure in Latin American Spanish
How do Spanish speakers judge Subject Verb (SV) vs. Verb Subject (VS) word orders—and how do verb type (unergative vs. unaccusative) and pragmatic condition (wide focus, subject-narrow focus, subject-given) shape those judgments? Using a controlled, online experiment, I test links between argument structure and information structure in four Latin American dialects.
At a glance
Design: Online acceptability-judgment (Likert 1–5), 2×3 (Verb Type × Pragmatic Condition)
Platform & Recruitment: Qualtrics (survey), Prolific (recruitment)
Participants: N = 69 (Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico) → 1,656 ratings (SV/VS)
Key findings:
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SV preferred overall; VS favored with unaccusatives
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Verb type and pragmatic condition jointly predict acceptability
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Region not predictive in these data
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Supports a link between argument structure & information structure (Unaccusative Hypothesis)
Resources
📂 Replication packet (1-page runbook & ES/EN materials)
Filled Pauses and Language Contact in Boston Spanish
How bilingual experience reshapes the smallest details of speech
When people speak, they often pause with short sounds like uh, ah, or eh while planning what to say next. These filled pauses keep the conversational floor and help listeners follow along—yet they vary across languages. English speakers tend to say uh/um, while Spanish speakers more often use eh/em. This project investigates how bilingual Spanish speakers in Boston use these tiny hesitation sounds, revealing how everyday speech encodes patterns of language contact and sound change.
At a glance
Design: Sociolinguistic interviews from Spanish in Boston Corpus
Speakers: Spanish-speaking Bostonians (N= 80, ≈6,364 tokens, 13 national origins)
Methods: Acoustic analysis in Praat and mixed-effects modeling in R.
Predictors: Age of arrival, language use with interlocutors, and phonetic context
Variable: Vowel quality in filled pauses—fronted [e] (eh) vs. centralized [a]/[ə] (ah, uh).
Key findings:
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Speakers with greater English exposure (earlier arrival, more bilingual networks) favor centralized pauses ([a], [ə]), while Spanish-dominant speakers prefer [e].
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Phonetic context plays little role—the pattern is socially, not structurally, driven.
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The shift is conservative: bilinguals reorder pause-filling norms rather than adopting English-like forms wholesale.
Subject Pronouns Expression
In Spanish, finite verbs can occur with or without an expressed subject pronoun—as in yo hablo ‘I speak’ vs. hablo ‘(I) speak’—without altering the meaning. Drawing on sociolinguistic interviews from Puerto Rican speakers in Louisiana and Puerto Rico, I examine how grammatical and discourse constraints pattern this variation. Results reveal Caribbean-typical pronoun rates (~37%) and show that internal morphosyntactic factors, not English contact, drive pronoun use in this sample.
At a glance
Design: Sociolinguistic interviews with 20 speakers (≈2,300 tokens); analyzed with Goldvarb.
Predictors: Person/#, switch-reference, tense–mood–aspect, prior-subject realization, clause type, and verb semantics.
Timeline: Conducted at Louisiana State University; later informed dissertation research expanding the same variable to new samples and contexts.
Key findings:
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Pronoun rates ≈ PR 37.8% vs. LA 37.0%; 1SG/3SG and switch-reference favor pronoun usage, plurals disfavor it; only location shows a clear social effect—routine English contact did not increase pronoun usage.
I have previously served as a Grad Assistant and Lab Manager for Dr. Daniel Erker in the Spanish in Boston Project, where I focused on transcribing and annotating sociolinguistic interviews related to various social and linguistic phenomena. Currently, I continue to contribute to the project through data creation, extraction, and cleaning, as well as running statistical analyses and creating visualizations.
I served as a Grad Assistant for Dr. Neil Myler's Mirror Principle Violations Project, where I surveyed existing descriptive materials on a wide range of languages to describe the interactions between causative and applicative morphemes.
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Publications
2025 Vidal-Covas, Lee-Ann M. Covariation & salience in linguistic contact: a sociophonetic study of liquid variation in Boston Spanish. Doctoral Dissertation, Boston University.
2024 Erker, Daniel G. & Vidal-Covas, Lee-Ann M. Variation, Contact, and Change in Boston Spanish: How social meaning shapes stylistic practice and bilingual optimization. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 17(2), 223-249. [DOI]
2023 Vidal-Covas, Lee-Ann M. ¿Va primero el verbo? OR ¿El sujeto va primero?: Subject-verb order in Latin American Spanish. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 8(1). [DOI]
2022 Erker, D. & Vidal-Covas, Lee-Ann M. Qué decimos cuando no decimos nada: Claves del cambio lingüístico inducido por contacto en las pausas llenas del español conversacional. Estudios del Observatorio, 80, pp. 1- 31.
2022 Erker, D. & Vidal-Covas, Lee-Ann M. What we say when we say nothing at all: Clues to contact-induced language change in Spanish conversational pause-fillers. Observatorio Studies, 80, pp. 1- 31.
2021 Dionne, D. & Vidal-Covas, Lee-Ann M. (Eds). Proceedings of the 45th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
2014 Orozco, R., Méndez Vallejo, Catalina & Vidal-Covas, Lee-Ann M. Los efectos condicionantes del verbo en el uso variable de los pronombres personales de sujeto. In: Actas del XVII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de la América Latina, João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil, July 14th-18th.
2013 Vidal-Covas, Lee-Ann M. El uso variable de los pronombres sujetos en el castellano puertorriqueño hablado en Luisiana y Puerto Rico. LSU Master's Theses. 3876. [DOI]