Chapter published in:
Multidisciplinary Approaches to Bilingualism in the Hispanic and Lusophone World
Edited by Kate Bellamy, Michael W. Child, Paz González, Antje Muntendam and M. Carmen Parafita Couto
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 13] 2017
► pp. 175–207

Spatial language and cognition among the last Ixcatec-Spanish bilinguals (Mexico)

| French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Oral Tradition Languages and Civilizations laboratory
This paper discusses spatial language and bilingual cognition with evidence from the last four speakers of Ixcatec who have shifted to Spanish in their everyday life. Based on a free-speech corpus, Study 1 shows that the Ixcatec spatial expressions are mainly intrinsic and geocentric, similar to what is reported for other Mesoamerican languages. Study 2 investigates co-speech gesture in a localization task and reveals the predominance of the geocentric frame of reference (FoR) with a switch to the egocentric FoR triggered by the Spanish word ‘left’. Study 3 is a nonverbal experiment which shows that the egocentric, geocentric, and intrinsic frames of reference are all available. To conclude, although the use of Spanish has added new spatial conceptualizations, the native ones are not lost.
Keywords: spatial cognition, frames of reference, bilingualism, language loss, Ixcatec, Spanish
Published online: 31 May 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.13.08ada
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