Visiting the Yucatan: more studies on Yucatec Mayan and Mexican Spanish

Heya. There are no results yet, but Katrina Housel, Carlos Gomez Gallo, and I just came back from the Valladolid, Mexico where we piloted and ran 3 studies on Yucatec and 4 studies on Mexican Spanish.

The studies investigate domain complexity effects (constituent length effects) and accessibility effects (givenness and animacy) on word order and construction choice.  Carlos also ran some of his Fruitcart dialogues and we recorded participants to analyze gestures (in collaboration with Susan Wagner Cook)  in addition to construction choice and the distribution of disfluencies. Over 160 students of the Universidad de Oriente (UNO) and their family members participated in the 7 studies. We also had a chance to visit the village of one of the students we met at UNO (thanks Laura!).

It’s still much too early to say anything about the results, but it definitely was a great experience. Carlos trained two annotators while we were in Valladolid who are busily transcribing and translating, but if you speak Spanish and/or Yucatec and may be interested in helping us transcribe the over 12,000 sound files we recorded, please let us know …

The people at UNO were super friendly and helpful. A big thanks goes out to Dr. Graciela Cortez, Partricia Diaz, Carlos Lopez, Gisela Leo, Nayely Dura, Maria Teresa, and Quely Salas! As during the last visit, it also was a pleasure getting to know more about the students there (in my case, this mostly consisted out of signing and slow word by word negotiations ;), but Carlos and Katrina streamlined the process by being able to actually speak Spanish ;). Thanks also to Juergen Bohnemeyer and Elisabeth Norcliffe who provided crucial advice for the preparation of the experiments and feedback for the development of the annotation guidelines (though none of the mistakes we made should be associated with them). Oh, and, of course, it was awesome seeing old and meeting new friends (Allan, Natalia, Christoph, Quely, Anne …  hopefully, there will be another chance to hang out soon). We stayed in of Violeta’s apartments (Casa Candelaria) right at the Candelaria Park, which I can highly recommend (note: the apartments are only rented out by the week and they are often booked out in advance; it’s pricier than some of the other places, but comes with wireless and a beautiful garden and many of the UNO visitors are staying there).

Hammocks in the garden

Garden

An outside kitchen in the garden

One of the apartments in the backyard

Katrina, Carlos, and Quely at the Candelaria Park right in front of Casa Candelaria

Dining room

Look out of the front window in our apartment (Casa Candelaria)

If you interested in visiting Valladolid, make sure to also check out Anne’s blog about the Yucatan.