Acquisition outcomes across domains in adult simultaneous bilinguals with French as weaker and stronger language

Abstract

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.

First Language Attrition as a Function of Age at Onset of Bilingualism: First Language Attainment of Turkish–English Bilinguals in the United Kingdom

“…Although this is an outcome that was not predicted in our hypotheses, these findings are entirely in line with what Kupisch et al. () found in the performance of adult French–German simultaneous bilinguals (i.e., with two L1s) who had acquired French either in a minority or majority context. Although all participants, regardless of the context, performed in a targetlike manner in a variety of morphosyntactic categories in controlled tasks, those who acquired French in the minority context had an accented L1 and drifted in voice onset times.…”

“…These advantages seem to be limited to phonological categories rather than structural ones and are evident in both perception, such as differentiation of minimal pairs (Hyltenstam, Bylund, Abrahamsson, & Park, ), and production, for instance, with respect to the production of voice onset time and accent rating (Au, Knightly, Jun, & Oh, ; but see Ventureyra, Pallier, & Yoo, , for null results). Despite these long‐lasting advantages over L2 learners, heritage speakers are usually perceived as sounding less nativelike in comparison to monolinguals (Kupisch et al., ), and the acoustic properties for some aspects of their speech (i.e., voice onset time in production of stops) are not always nativelike (Lein, Kupisch, & van de Weijer, ). With respect to voice onset time specifically, one likely cause of the changes in L1 values for this temporal characteristic of stop production has been suggested to be crosslinguistic influence, a process that might lead to the development of an accented L1 (Lein et al., ).…”

Voice onset time and global foreign accent in German–French simultaneous bilinguals during adulthood

“…As for studies in the European context, Kupisch et al (2014b) analyzed VOT for /p/, /t/ and /k/ in five French-German 2L1s from Germany and five from France. Only the 2L1s from Germany showed different VOTs for /t/ and /k/ with respect to monolinguals.…”

Teasing Apart the Effects of Dominance, Transfer, and Processing in Reference Production by German–Italian Bilingual Adolescents

“…Belletti (1999) claims that ci-clitics (i.e., locative clitics, meaning 'there') and ne-clitics (meaning 'thereof') have the structure of prepositional phrases, thus differing from accusative and dative clitics, which have the structure of determiners. Recent literature has shown that prepositions may represent a vulnerable domain in bilingual language acquisition (Kupisch et al 2014). Therefore, the use of clitics having the same structure as prepositions might be challenging, too.…”