Foreign Accent in Pre- and Primary School Heritage Bilinguals

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the two languages of early bilingual children can influence each other, depending on the linguistic property, while adult bilinguals predominantly show influence from the majority language to the minority (heritage) language. While this observed shift in influence patterns is probably related to a shift in dominance between early childhood and adulthood, there is little data documenting it. Our study investigates the perceived global accent in the two languages of German-Russian bilingual children in Germany, comparing 4–6-year-old (preschool) children and 7–9-year-old (primary school) children. The results indicate that in German the older children sound less accented than the younger children, while the opposite is true for Russian. This suggests that the primary school years are a critical period for heritage language maintenance.

Russian heritage language development in narrative contexts: Evidence from pre- and primary-school children in Norway, Germany, and the UK

“…In line with previous research, including recent studies on vocabulary acquisition in RHL (e.g., Klassert et al, 2014), we also see in Figure 4 that the two lines for HL and majority language development cross around age 5 for the children from families with two Russian-speaking parents, indicating that the dominance shift occurs already at this young age in this group of RHL children. This finding is compatible with the reversed accentedness pattern that we observed in an earlier study with the same group of German-Russian bilinguals, where the incidence of a perceived foreign accent decreased from younger (preschool) to older (primary school) children in German, while it increased for Russian (Kupisch et al, 2021). While no such shifts have been attested in our previous studies investigating the acquisition of grammatical gender in RHL in the same participant groups, it is clear that all three linguistic domains are affected by input factors, with language exposure in the home in terms of family type (HR family vs. mixed family) and age of starting preschool as the major predictors.…”

“…Large-scale investigations studying RHL development across a wider age range and a larger number of children are scarce. To fill in this gap, in the current study, we investigate heritage language development in preand primary-school children between the ages of 3 and 10 based on data obtained in a large-scale project focusing on the grammatical and phonological (global accent) development in RHL in Norway, Germany, and the United Kingdom (UK) (Mitrofanova et al, 2018(Mitrofanova et al, , 2022Rodina et al, 2020;Kupisch et al, 2021). 1 The in-depth investigation of grammatical gender in these studies revealed that bilinguals in different national contexts developed finegrained sensitivity to grammatical gender cues in Russian, which ensured their successful acquisition of this property.…”

“…Large-scale investigations studying RHL development across a wider age range and a larger number of children are scarce. To fill in this gap, in the current study, we investigate heritage language development in pre- and primary-school children between the ages of 3 and 10 based on data obtained in a large-scale project focusing on the grammatical and phonological (global accent) development in RHL in Norway, Germany, and the United Kingdom (UK) ( Mitrofanova et al, 2018 , 2022 ; Rodina et al, 2020 ; Kupisch et al, 2021 ). 1…”

“I no longer count in German.” On dominance shift in returnee heritage speakers

“…They are more dominant in their SL German than in their HL Portuguese (see Figures 1 and 2). This finding is in line with the literature on HL development, which assumes a switch to the dominant SL as soon as child HSs enter the SL's school system (Benmamoun et al, 2013;Kupisch et al, 2021;Rothman, 2009). Our results indicate that the effect of this switch lasts over the HSs' lifetime if they maintain their residence in the migration setting.…”

“…For bilingual children, in particular for child HSs, it is assumed that a significant change in language balance occurs when entering the school system, particularly when the main language of instruction is the SL (Benmamoun et al, 2013;De Cat, 2020). For instance, in a study on global accent in German-Russian bilingual children living in Germany (with Russian as HL and German as SL), Kupisch et al (2021) compared preschool with primary school children and concluded that a significant change in their accent occurred in this age span. The authors argue that this may be the consequence of quantitative and qualitative changes in language exposure (maybe also in language attitudes), and be indicative of changes in language dominance toward the dominant SL (German).…”