The effects of contact on native language pronunciation in an L2 migrant setting

Abstract

The primary aim of this study was to determine whether native speakers of German living in either Canada or the Netherlands are perceived to have a foreign accent in their native German speech. German monolingual listeners (n = 19) assessed global foreign accent of 34 L1 German speakers in Anglophone Canada, 23 L1 German speakers in the Dutch Netherlands, and five German monolingual controls in Germany. The experimental subjects had moved to either Canada or the Netherlands at an average age of 27 years and had resided in their country of choice for an average of 37 years. The results revealed that the German listeners were more likely to perceive a global foreign accent in the German speech of the consecutive bilinguals in Anglophone Canada and the Dutch Netherlands than in the speech of the control group and that nine immigrants to Canada and five immigrants to the Netherlands were clearly perceived to be non-native speakers of German. Further analysis revealed that quality and quantity of contact with the native German language had a more significant effect on predicting global foreign accent in native speech than age of arrival or length of residence. Two types of contact were differentiated: (i) C−M represented communicative settings in which little code-mixing between the L1 and L2 was expected to occur, and (ii) C+M represented communicative settings in which code-mixing was expected to be more likely. The variable C−M had a significant impact on predicting foreign accent in native speech, whereas the variable C+M did not. The results suggest that contact with the L1 through communicative settings in which code-mixing is inhibited is especially conducive to maintaining the stability of native language pronunciation in consecutive bilinguals living in a migrant context.

The relevance of first language attrition to theories of bilingual development

“…The first more in-depth investigations of a range of measures of lexical diversity and fluency as well as overall accuracy, however, failed to find any consistent 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 relationship with a broad range of language exposure and use measures (Schmid, 2007;. The absence of an effect of exposure, and in particular of the frequency of use in infomal contexts, has since been replicated across a host of investigations of attrition across a range of linguistic levels, such as perceived foreign accent (Hopp & Schmid, 2013;de Leeuw, Schmid & Mennen, 2010) This suggests that a much more prominent role should be given in investigations of bilingual development to the notion of code-switching: Language systems are probably never co-activated more closely than in speakers who are dense code-switchers (Green …”

“…On the other hand, bilingual speakers who frequently use one of their languages in a setting in which it is inappropriate to code-switch, for instance at work or with monolinguals, especially professionals such as (simultaneous) interpreters (Woumans, Ceuleers, van der Linden, Szmalec & Duyck, 2015), have extensive practice in minimizing co-activation and crosslinguistic interference, in addition to a more developed monitoring system. Several studies have found that it is mainly speakers who use the L1 regularly in professional contexts who show relatively minimal attrition effects, while there is no such benefit among speakers who use the L1 mainly within the family or with friends (de Leeuw, Schmid & Mennen, 2010;Schmid, 2007;.…”

Cross-linguistic interaction in trilingual phonological development: the role of the input in the acquisition of the voicing contrast

“…A number of studies have shown that under these circumstances, cross-linguistic interactions may occur more commonly. De Leeuw, Schmid and Mennen (2010), for instance, found that native German speakers with long-term residence in an L2-speaking environment were more likely to be perceived as non-native in their L1 if they regularly engaged in code-switching.…”

“…This requires dual language activation and further increases the likelihood of cross-linguistic interactions (de Leeuw et al, 2010). In sum, the context in which Sofia and Maya hear Italian explains why the language was affected by English, but not by Spanish.…”

The effects of heritage language instruction on first language proficiency: a psycholinguistic perspective

“…To date, the factor that has been shown to exert the greatest effect on L1 maintenance among speakers who arrived in the L2 setting as children or young adolescents is, not surprisingly, the degree of L1 contact (e.g. Bylund, Abrahamsson, and Hyltenstam 2010;de Leeuw, Schmid, and Mennen 2010;Hakuta and D'Andrea 1992;YeniKomshian, Flege, and Liu 2000). However, studies on L1 attrition in speakers who arrived in the L2 setting before adulthood seldom take into account the possibility that their participants could also have received formal instruction in the L1 through some form of heritage language (HL) education.…”