This study investigates the adult grammars of French simultaneous bilingual speakers (2L1s) whose other language is German. Apart from providing an example of French as heritage language in Europe, the goals of this paper are (i) to compare the acquisition of French in a minority and majority language context, (ii) to identify the relative vulnerability of individual domains, and (iii) to investigate whether 2L1s are vulnerable to language attrition when moving to their heritage country during adulthood. We include two groups of German-French 2L1s: One group grew up predominantly in France, but moved to Germany during adulthood; the other group grew up predominantly in Germany and stayed there. Performance is compared in different domains, including adjective placement, gender marking, articles, prepositions, foreign accent and voice onset time. Results indicate that differences between the two groups are minimal in morpho-syntax, but more prominent in pronunciation.

The study reported in this paper examines foreign accent (FA) in adult simultaneous bilinguals (2L1ers). Specifically, we investigate how accent is affected if a first language is acquired as a minority (heritage) language as compared to a majority (dominant) language. We compare the perceived FA in both languages of 38 adult 2L1ers (German-French and German-Italian) to that of monolingual native speakers (L1ers) and late second language learners (L2ers). Naturalistic speech samples are judged by 84 native speakers of the respective languages. Results indicate that the majority language is always spoken without an FA, while results for the heritage language fall between those of L1 and L2 speakers. For the heritage language, we further show that a native accent correlates with length of residence in the heritage country during childhood but not during adulthood. Furthermore, raters have comparatively more difficulties when judging the accent of a heritage speaker. The results of this study add to our current understanding of what factors shape the phonology of a heritage language system in adulthood.

This study is concerned with the distribution of the definite article in German with plural nominals that have a generic reading. In Standard German, genericity is typically expressed by bare nouns (Tiger sind gefährlich 'Tigers are dangerous'). Many researchers have claimed that there is variation in article use in the expression of generic reference in German (e.g., Brugger 1993;Longobardi 1994;Krifka et al. 1995;Chierchia 1998;Dayal 2004;Oosterhof 2008), but very little empirical evidence has been provided to support this claim. Besides filling this research gap, we investigate which factors influence the use of articles in plural subjects with generic reference. In doing so, we include linguistic factors (kind-level vs. individual-level predicates) as well as sociolinguistic factors (age and regional background). Results show that with generic plural subjects definite articles are optional but bare subjects are preferred; definite subjects are accepted more often with kind-level predicates than with individuallevel predicates.

The HABLA-corpus (Hamburg Adult Bilingual LAnguage) comprises data in the form of semi-structured interviews gathered in the project E11, Linguistic Aspects of Language Attrition and Second Language Acquisition in adult bilinguals (German-French and German-Italian). E11 investigated the language of adult bilinguals (2L1 speakers) who grew up in Germany, Italy or France being exposed to two languages simultaneously from birth, comparing them to advanced second language (L2) learners. In this contribution, we explain the motivation for creating the corpus and introduce the corpus design, including information about the subjects, data acquisition and labelling, quality and transcription conventions, with the purpose of providing an overview of the corpus and facilitate its use.

Abstract. This study investigates subject nominals in German in adult simulta neous bilinguals (2L1s) with French or Italian as the other language, focusing on plural and mass nouns with a definite article. These have a specific interpretation in written Standard German, while they are ambiguous between a specific and a generic interpretation in the Romance languages and in some varieties of German. The aims are to (i) characterize the end state grammar regarding a phenomenon that does not only show partially overlapping syntactic properties in the two target languages but also intra linguistic variation, (ii) compare 2L1 and L1 end state grammars, (iii) investigate the role of frequency of exposure and (iv) study the role of overlap with the contact languages. Results from an acceptability judgment task and a truth value judgment task suggest that 2L1s with frequent exposure to German are more conservative than monolinguals, tending towards overcorrection rather than cross linguistic influence.