Acquiring French Intonation against the Backdrop of Heritage Bilingualism: The Case of German–Turkish Learners

Abstract

This paper investigates the intonation of L3 French, produced by six bilingual learners (ages: 15–17) who speak Turkish as a heritage language (HL) along with German and six same-aged monolingual German learners. We examined of a corpus of read speech in two respects: first, we determined the number of accentual phrases (APs) and, second, we extracted F0 values for each segment, normalized them, and calculated the deviations from the average values produced by three native controls (age: 21–23). Although the bilinguals were expected to outperform the monolinguals due to certain similarities between the intonational systems of French and Turkish, their mean deviation from the native contours was only slightly smaller than that of the monolinguals (difference not significant). To determine how strongly the bilinguals’ Turkish intonation was influenced by German and whether it could serve as a basis for positive transfer whatsoever, we compared their production in Turkish with data recorded from three monolingual Turkish L1 speakers (ages: 21–32) and five German learners of L2 Turkish (ages: 22–43). Results show that the bilinguals’ Turkish intonation does not deviate substantially from the monolinguals’ one, in contrast to the contours produced by the L2 learners. This suggests that metalinguistic and prosodic awareness should be fostered in heritage bilinguals to make them benefit from their full linguistic repertoire.

AAiMLL: Acquisition Advantages in MultiLingual Learners: The Case of the Multilingual Child

“…They present the training of Turkish-German pupils (in Germany), in order to improve their French phonology, based on active comparisons with Turkish. Grünke and Gabriel (2022) were able to show an accelerative effect (based on positive transfer from Turkish) in the bilingual Turkish-German speakers, in comparison to monolingual German speakers. Intervention with recourse to Turkish also had an additional positive effect, according to Gabriel et al (2020, p. 15): the increase in motivation to learn French.…”

Third language phonological acquisition: Understanding sound structure in a multilingual world

“…(2010), Wrembel (2015), whereas L3 phonological research focusing on language trios where L1 and L3 are non‐Indo‐European languages and L2 is Indo‐European languages was less frequent for example, Onishi (2016). Non‐Indo‐European languages as L1 (and L2), or as L2 and L3 in L3 phonological research were much less frequent for example, Qin and Jongman (2016), Grünke and Gabriel (2022), Zhang and Levis (2021). It is clear that there is a vast gap in the literature with regard to multilingualism in western and southern Africa, and L3 acquisition of minority and indigenous languages.…”

“… a L3 participants in Lloyd‐Smith (2021), Geiss et al. (2022), Grünke and Gabriel (2022) acquired L1 as their heritage language, and L2 as their majority language. …”

“…As shown in the tables, almost all studies recorded transfer from the L2 to the L3, and over half reported hybrid transfer from the L1 and L2. However, Grünke and Gabriel (2022) find that neither L1 nor L2 has transfer onto L3 production in terms of intonational patterns.…”

“…Garcia, 2013;Wrembel et al, 2019), which can reduce the power of statistical analyses (Cabrelli Amaro & Wrembel, 2016). As shown in Table 4, the majority of previous L3 phonological acquisition studies involve participants who were undergraduates and older Grünke and Gabriel (2022) acquired L1 as their heritage language, and L2 as their majority language. b Seven participants were exposed to German since birth, while other 13 participants were exposed to German between 2 and 6 years old (mean age = 2.7).…”