UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As a third-year Paterno Fellow and Schreyer Scholar, Caden Vitti has worked to find an intersection between his two majors: Spanish and energy engineering.
Through his Spanish major, Vitti chose to focus on linguistics. This past summer, he was selected by the Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) program to conduct research in Puerto Rico. The PIRE program, which is housed in the Center for Language Science in the College of the Liberal Arts, allows students who have an interest in linguistics research to travel to a country for six to eight weeks to conduct research. All research-related expenses are covered by the grant, including airfare, lodging, meals, and summer tuition and fees.
Vitti, a Brentwood, New Hampshire native, learned about the PIRE program while working in the Brain Tracking Lab with Paola Giuli Dussias, professor of Spanish, linguistics and psychology. In this lab, Vitti worked on different projects with graduate students and faculty. He helped code data and run trials with participants.
The Paterno Fellow says he chose to go to Puerto Rico because the research he was focusing on looked at how Spanish-English speakers who use both languages frequently would process the use of nonbinary pronouns in the English language.
“I was looking at whether people could use code-switching, which is alternating between both languages, to understand how you could use ‘they’ and ‘them’ pronouns to address one person,” Vitti said. “During my research, the sentences would start in Spanish and finish in English, or the alternative, and we would look at reaction times and behavioral processes of how much grammatical interpretation the speakers would be doing.”
Before he can make conclusions about his data, Vitti has to code the data he collected this summer and conduct interviews with English speakers to use as a comparison. Although he has yet to conclude, he says that the social response was interesting to learn.
“I had a lot of interesting conversations that were kind of off the script with people that just gave me an interesting sociological perception of how they perceived gender,” Vitti said. “The Puerto Rican community has a difficult time creating a sense of identity with the two languages since Spanish and English are both very prominent within their communities."
He concluded that the Puerto Ricans he spoke to were very forward and progressive with their thinking. Although the traditional Spanish language provided barriers to addressing nonbinary individuals, they had their own methods of going about the topic.