Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Current Issue

Speakers use corrective focus as an explicit way to correct misunderstandings in communication. We investigate whether immersive contact with a rhythmically different language affects the production and perception of duration as a cue to corrective and non–corrective focus. We tested twenty-eight native speakers and sixty-four native listeners of Urdu, half of whom lived in Germany and used German as a second language, and half lived in Pakistan. German is a stress–timed language with head–prominence marking and makes intensive use of duration to mark corrective focus, while Urdu is a syllable–timed language with edge–prominence marking, which uses duration differently from German to mark focus types. Results showed that the majority language, German, affected focus processing in Urdu differently across modalities: In production, focus marking was not affected by country of residence, while in perception, Urdu speakers living in Germany were more sensitive to duration in the corrective focus context than Urdu speakers in Pakistan. We analyze this as cross–linguistic influence and argue that contact with a stress–timed, head–prominence majority language (here: German) affects the cue weighting in the native language Urdu in perception but not (yet) in production.

The phenomenon of language change in contact has been explored most significantly in speakers of a language who migrate, while fewer studies explore how language is affected across different generations. In this study, we aimed to investigate the role of inter-generational attrition on the production of clitic pronouns and clitic clusters. 86 adult speakers of Italian took part in the study: homeland residents, long-term UK residents, and heritage speakers born and living in the UK from Italian families. Participants were tested on the production of different instances of clitic pronouns including clusters, a novelty of the study, and differences in response distribution were analysed with General Additive Models. Results reveal that the homeland population shows a strong preference for the production of clitics and clitic clusters, long-term residents retain a preference for clitics but not clusters, and heritage speakers disfavour the use of both clitics and clusters across the board, preferring the use of lexical items. This neat pattern of use across generations of migrants suggests a loss of the specificity and preference of clitics through language transmission between different generations of speakers of Italian removed from the homeland and immersed in a non-clitic language.

This study compared word-prosodic abilities of early second language learners (eL2) and monolingual learners of German. We examined the production of word-initial and word-final clusters and the placement of stress and analyzed potential effects of cross-linguistic influence (CLI). Monolingual German-speaking children (n = 38) and eL2-learners of German (n = 26; age of onset to German 24 to 41 months) aged between 53 and 60 months completed a pseudoword repetition task following the metrical and phonotactic constraints of German. We collected background information via parental questionnaires. The eL2-learners acquired 12 different L1s. To explore the effects of CLI, we grouped the heritage languages by the number of consonants permitted in word-initial and word-final position, the segmental make-up of clusters, and stress patterns. The production accuracy of word-initial clusters and word stress was very high, indicating a high degree of maturation and showing no effects of CLI. In contrast, the production accuracy of word-final clusters was lower and effects of CLI were found, presumably related to smaller sonority distances compared to word-initial clusters. The study contributes empirically to the under-investigated area of eL2 word-prosodic development.

The current study investigated request production in Russian as a Heritage language (HL), with a special focus on the role of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) of the majority societal language (here SL-Hebrew) and Age of Onset of Bilingualism (AOB). Ninety-seven adult participants were recruited in four groups: three groups of Russian-Hebrew bilinguals with various AOBs of SL-Hebrew – before the age of 5 (n = 32), between the ages of 5–13 (n = 20), after the age of 13 (n = 19) – and a control group of monolingual Russian speakers (n = 26). The study elicited 20 requests in formal and informal contexts through oral role-plays. The results indicate that heritage speakers acquire the basics of prototypical Russian request strategies across various social contexts. The results also show effects of CLI and AOB in the pragmatic competence of HL-speakers. When faced with linguistic difficulties to express requests, HL speakers resort to the use of compensatory strategies leading to the creation of novel structures. These novel structures are a combination of conventions that are characteristic of the Russian acquired in childhood and transfer from the dominant SL. The study makes an important contribution to the understanding of HL pragmatic development by investigating the effects of CLI and AOB.