Abstract
This study examines the production of speech rhythm in Turkish-German bilinguals and German monolinguals in their L3 English and their L1/L2 German. A variety of durational and pitch-based rhythm metrics were calculated from read speech produced by the participants in both English and German. A comparison of rhythm metrics across groups and languages revealed that (a) the productions of bilinguals and monolinguals differ both in their English and in their German, (b) the groups vary more in their English than in their German productions, and (c) the source of variation cannot always be clearly attributed to CLI from the bilinguals’ L1 Turkish since unexpected results emerged in the L3 English. We take these findings as further evidence for a combined multilingual language system in which all background languages are interconnected and may be the source of CLI, which is not only conditioned by both universal and language-specific factors, but also manifested as property-by-property and bit-by-bit transfer.
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Notes
- 1.
One reviewer rightly noted that the subjects may have been speakers of the German multiethnolect Kiezdeutsch which is, among other things, associated with Turkish immigrant identity. This cannot be ruled out since their Turkish was not examined for accentedness in this case. We would then be dealing with an English accent associated with the variety of German that is spoken by the participants rather than with their HL. See Sect. 6 for more details.
- 2.
Usually, only PVI-V is normalized for speech rate in the field, but not PVI-C, since speech rate has only been found to correlate with the vocalic and not the consonantal variables. Since it is difficult to justify this practice in crosslinguistic studies involving languages with different vocalic and consonantal inventories as well as diverging phonotactic structures, we will use the normalized PVIs of both variables (i.e., nPVI-V as well as nPVI-C) to allow for a more objective measure of pairwise variability in speech.
- 3.
Note that there are several other rhythm metrics, often slight mutations of each other, that are rarely used and are thus not mentioned here. See Fuchs (2016) for a review.
- 4.
But, see Gut (2010) for a case study on four trilingual speakers with different background languages that show that these speakers produced rhythmic structures that were distinct from those of native speakers.
- 5.
Although age of acquisition in German differs in both groups, due to early immersion, the bilingual group is generally perceived as native-like, with presumably pervasive nuances that may emerge in highly scrutinized contexts such as laboratory settings.
- 6.
See Arvaniti (2012), who showed that different types of rhythm can be elicited from one and the same language if the prosodic structure of words used in sentences is manipulated in a way to foster a specific type of rhythm.
- 7.
While we used a categorization into obstruents and sonorants, we will consider obstruents to be equivalent to consonantal material and sonorants equivalent to vocalic material. Thus, measures based on obstruents will be referred to as consonantal metrics (e.g., VarcoC instead of VarcoO), while those based on sonorants will be referred to as vocalic ones (e.g., VarcoV instead of VarcoS).
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Marlene Keßler for her assistance in the coding of the data, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Needless to say, all errors are our own.
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Reading Text English
One day Catherine and Rose, two recent Caltech graduates who had been friends ever since they had been little children, decided to go on a three-week hiking trip to the Laprig hills together. They met at Rose’s place to make travel plans: to book their hotel room, decide on various places they wanted to visit for their breakfasts, lunches and dinners and find out about the rangers’ warnings they had to heed. Rose had prepared the most wonderful meal—potato soup, cooked plums with root vegetables and cranberry sauce, and apple ice cream with sunflower seeds for dessert—and she had put a full bottle of expensive red wine into the fridge. Rose was extremely excited about their holiday and wanted this evening of planning to be perfect. They used to go to the theater together every Thursday, but the two young women hadn’t really spent quality time with each other for the last three years since they both had extremely busy schedules. At six o’clock sharp Catherine rang the doorbell and Rose opened her front door. After they had shooed away a rook from the front porch, the two friends hugged happily and went inside, where Catherine hung up her bag on the coat rack. Rose asked her to take a seat. Doing as she had been bid, Catherine sat down at the clean wooden table and Rose went into the kitchen to fetch drinks. While Catherine was sitting in the living room on her own contemplating the neat yellow pattern on Rose’s wallpaper she heard the strangest noise. It sounded as if a panther cub was trying to roar, and she could not place it anywhere: It might have originated outside the window just as well as right under the plush sofa that she could just see from where she was sitting. For a moment Catherine was worried, but then Rose came back with two crystal glasses and the wine, so Catherine forgot about the incident.
Appendix 2: Reading Text “Der Nordwind und die Sonne”
Einst stritten sich Nordwind und Sonne, wer von ihnen beiden wohl der Stärkere wäre, als ein Wanderer, der in einen warmen Mantel gehüllt war, des Weges daherkam. Sie wurden einig, dass derjenige für den Stärkeren gelten sollte, der den Wanderer zwingen würde, seinen Mantel abzunehmen. Der Nordwind blies mit aller Macht, aber je mehr er blies, desto fester hüllte sich der Wanderer in seinen Mantel ein. Endlich gab der Nordwind den Kampf auf. Nun erwärmte die Sonne die Luft mit ihren freundlichen Strahlen, und schon nach wenigen Augenblicken zog der Wanderer seinen Mantel aus. Da musste der Nordwind zugeben, dass die Sonne von ihnen beiden der Stärkere war.
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Domene Moreno, C., Kabak, B. (2023). Monolingual-Bilingual (Non-)convergence in L3 Rhythm. In: Fuchs, R. (eds) Speech Rhythm in Learner and Second Language Varieties of English. Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8940-7_7
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