VOT production, writing skills, and general proficiency in multilingual learners of French: approaching the intertwinement of different linguistic levels

Abstract We investigate the interrelations between pronunciation and writing skills in French as a foreign language produced by two groups of bilingual learners (German-Russian; German-Turkish) and a monolingually raised German control group (each n = 10). As an indicator of the learners’ pronunciation skills, we refer to a perceptually relevant acoustic feature of stop production, “Voice Onset Time” (VOT). Our aim is to explore whether the learners’ proficiency at the level of pronunciation is mirrored in (1) their global language competencies and (2) their writing skills. We applied an extreme-cases approach based on the learners’ VOT productions in L3 French. Both positive and negative d…

Foreign language learning in multilingual Germany

This special issue on foreign language (FL) learning in multilingual contextsprovides insights into cross- and inter-linguistic phenomena comparingmonolingual and multilingual students who learn FLs in linguistically het-erogeneous classrooms. All contributions are based on data gathered in pro-jects carried out within the research cluster “Language education andmultilingualism”/“Sprachliche Bildung und Mehrsprachigkeit”, which hasbeen funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research(Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) from 2013 to 2020. Bybringing together linguistic and educational perspectives on FL learning andteaching as well as different methodological a…

Chapter 12. Focus, prosody, and subject positions in L3 Spanish

Chapter 15. Portuguese remnants in the Spanish of Olivenza (Extremadura)

VOT in French as a foreign language : A production and perception study with mono- and multilingual learners (German/Mandarin-Chinese)

This study addresses the production of Voice Onset Time (VOT) in French as a foreign language (FFL). The learners are young multilingual learners who speak Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language along with German. To determine potential effects of the learners’ multilingual background, these multilingual learners were compared to three control groups: (1) monolingual German learners of FFL, (2) monolingual Mandarin Chinese learners of FFL, and (3) native speakers of French (L1). In addition, a perception experiment was carried out to find out to what extent the VOT values measured in the production data contribute to the perception of foreign accent. Our results show that multilingual lear…

<em>(Inter-)Fonología del Español Contemporáneo</em> (I)FEC: Methodology of a research program for corpus phonology

The present contribution describes and discusses the methodology of the corpus phonological research program (Inter-)Fonología del Español Contemporáneo —(I)FEC—, which aims to document both the phonic variation in the Spanish-speaking world and the pronunciation of Spanish as an L2 and a foreign language in different learner groups. Partly based on the methodology of the French research program (Inter)Phonologie du Français Contemporain —(I)PFC—, (I)FEC includes, in addition to a word list with several (potential) minimal pairs and a reading task, also a discourse completion task (DCT) aiming to collect data for the analysis of different intonational tunes. The paper offers a detailed desc…