Salience | Lee-Ann Vidal Covas, PhD

Covariation & salience in linguistic contact: a sociophonetic study of liquid variation in Boston Spanish

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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This dissertation examines how Spanish-speaking Bostonians of Puerto Rican and Dominican origin navigate linguistic variation and lectal coherence, focusing on the role of salience in shaping the outcomes of linguistic contact. Speakers do not adopt, resist, or modify linguistic features at random—social and cognitive factors shape how variation unfolds in contact settings. While prior research has shown that some features vary in their susceptibility to change in bilingual environments, the extent to which salience influences this process remains underexplored. By analyzing both low-salience features (e.g., subject pronoun expression, subject placement, and filled pauses) and high-salience features (e.g., coda /s/ and liquid variation), this study explores how speakers engage with variation in response to social and linguistic pressures in a dynamic contact setting.

Using sociolinguistic interviews from 22 Spanish speakers in Boston, the study employs quantitative variationist methods to analyze the distribution and interaction of multiple variables. The results show that low-salience features exhibit modest, yet, measurable and systematic structural convergence with English grammatical norms, reflecting bilingual optimization strategies. In contrast, high-salience features provide speakers with greater social and stylistic flexibility, allowing them to deploy these features in ways that align with their identity, ideology, and interactional goals.

In some cases, such as with rhotics, speakers maintain a broader sense of Caribbean linguistic identity—even after extended residence in the mainland U.S.—using these features as shibboleths of national identity. For example, the lateralization of the tap continues to differentiate Puerto Rican and Dominican speech styles, serving as a salient marker of regional affiliation. However, other high-salience features, such as laterals, appear to carry less social weight, making them more susceptible to contact-induced restructuring or stylistic reinterpretation.

To examine how these patterns of variation intersect, the study incorporates a covariation analysis that investigates whether and how the five variables pattern together—particularly in relation to speakers’ exposure to English and broader contact-induced pressures. This analysis reveals a fundamental asymmetry: lower-salience features tend to shift in tandem, reflecting a broader structural realignment shaped by bilingual optimization. Higher-salience features, by contrast, do not show the same kind of coordinated movement. Instead, they remain sites of sociolinguistic agency, affording speakers the flexibility to reinforce, neutralize, or reinterpret these forms in ways that serve social and identity-related goals. These findings contribute to sociolinguistic theory by demonstrating that salience is not merely an inherent property of linguistic variables but a dynamic, ideologically mediated phenomenon—one that shapes how and why speakers retain, modify, or reconfigure particular linguistic features in language- and dialect-contact settings.

Moreover, the current research advances understanding of linguistic agency, identity, and change in multilingual communities by conceptualizing salience as a continuum rather than a dichotomy. By framing linguistic features along a salience continuum, the study reveals how different variables interact with social forces in contact settings, offering insights into the ways speakers navigate variation to manage group affiliations and respond to sociolinguistic pressures. Additionally, by incorporating liquid variation into the study of salience and covariation, this dissertation broadens the empirical and theoretical scope of the study of Spanish in the United States, shedding new light on the ways bilingual speakers actively engage with variation.

Variation, Contact, and Change in Boston Spanish: How social meaning shapes stylistic practice and bilingual optimization

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Covariation & Salience in Linguistic Contact

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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	Acoustic analysis in Praat Mixed-effects modeling in R	Praat RStudio

Key findings

Lower-salience features show modest, systematic convergence with English norms (bilingual optimization).
Higher-salience features remain stable & socially indexed, marking national identity distinctions.
Salience is continuous and ideologically mediated, structuring which variables shift together and which become identity markers.