The social pragmatics of address in heritage Spanish: a virtual reality study

This study employed virtual reality to study heritage bilinguals’ pragmatic and morphosyntactic use of pronouns of address in heritage Spanish, namely the tú/usted paradigm. Forty-four heritage speakers experienced eight virtual scenarios embedding an array of social factors, such as gender and social rank of the addressee. This experimental design elicited a corpus of 21,882 words, which includes 753 instances of second-person address distributed into the tú (50.60%) and usted (49.40%) pronouns. Importantly, participants produced the tú/usted paradigm across all the expected syntactic environments, indicating that the feature geometry of this linguistic paradigm does not constrain its everyday use in heritage Spanish. A mixed-effects analysis further revealed that participants were more likely to express formality with female and unknown interlocutors. Since the majority of the participants are female (88.09%), a separate analysis confirmed the gender effect, which suggests that female speakers conveyed in-group solidarity through their pronoun usage in female-to-female interactions. Although participants produced the tú/usted paradigm across the target scenarios, they reported higher usage of usted (68.45%) in their perception data compared to their production data (49.40%), revealing a discrepancy between what speakers believe they do with language and how they actually behave in context. By studying the nuances of address in virtual worlds, the present study contributes to our current understanding of pragmatics in heritage bilingualism.