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Acquisition outcomes across domains in adult simultaneous bilinguals with French as weaker and stronger language1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2013

TANJA KUPISCH ,
TATJANA LEIN ,
DAGMAR BARTON ,
DAWN JUDITH SCHRÖDER ,
ILSE STANGEN  and
ANTJE STOEHR
TANJA KUPISCH*
Affiliation:
University of Hamburg Lund University
TATJANA LEIN
Affiliation:
University of Bremen
DAGMAR BARTON
Affiliation:
University of Hamburg
DAWN JUDITH SCHRÖDER
Affiliation:
University of Hamburg
ILSE STANGEN
Affiliation:
University of Hamburg
ANTJE STOEHR
Affiliation:
CLS, Radboud University Nijmegen/IMPRS for Language Sciences, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
*
Address for correspondence: Tanja Kupisch, Italian Studies, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Helgonabacken 12, SE-223 62 Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]
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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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , November 2014 , pp. 347 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

1

The research presented in this paper originated in project E11 at the Research Centre of Multilingualism in Hamburg. We wish to acknowledge funding by the German Science Foundation granted to the first author. Part of the research we present is based on thesis work by Deniz Akpinar, Dagmar Barton, Tatjana Lein, Judith Schröder, Ilse Stangen and Antje Stöhr at the University of Hamburg.

References

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