Institution: Hamburg University (Germany): PhD in Romance Linguistics
Degree Date: 2019

Dissertation Title: Phonetic production in early and late German-Spanish bilinguals

Dissertation URL: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343979394_Phonetic_production_in_early_and_late_German-Spanish_bilinguals

Subject Language(s): German (deu)
German (deu)

Dissertation Director(s): Prof. Dr. Christopher Gabriel

Dissertation Abstract:

The aim of this study was the investigate both the acoustic differences and the global accent ratings of
different types of bilinguals. The 40 speakers who participated in the study were divided into five groups
(8 members per group). There were two groups of monolinguals (Spanish and German), one group of
L1 Spanish – L2 German proficient late bilinguals, and two groups or early bilinguals (most of them
also simultaneous bilinguals). For one group of the early bilinguals, Spanish was the societal language
during childhood and German the heritage language, whereas the other group was brought up in
Germany and acquired Spanish at home.

The study combines the use of global accent ratings, as typically done in bilingualism studies (e.g. Flege
et al., 1995; or Oyama, 1976), with linguistic (acoustic) analyses, as proposed in Abrahamsson &
Hyltenstam (2009). The acoustic studies focus on segmental phonetics, namely different aspects of
vowels, stops, fricatives, and rhotics were investigated, which cover more than 75% of the segments of
each language. Lastly, the study evaluated the impact of each of these phonetic features in the global
accent ratings.

The findings support the idea that early exposure to a language does not guarantee a native-like
pronunciation (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2009), as only half of the early bilinguals passed for
natives in their heritage language despite presenting few phonetic deviations from monolingual norm.
On the contrary, all of them passed for natives in their societal language. In turn, the late bilinguals
were very far from monolinguals in the global accent ratings and, to a lesser extent, in the acoustic
studies. The evaluation of the impact of each phonetic feature on global accent ratings seemingly
suggests that other aspects (most likely intonation) can better account for global accent ratings when
the speakers evaluated are highly proficient.

Keywords: early bilinguals, late bilinguals, simultaneous bilinguals, heritage-language speakers,
Spanish, German, vowels, stops, fricatives, rhotics, and global accent.

Thesis awarded with the Werner-Kraus prize by the German Association of Hispanists.
http://hispanistica.de/werner-krauss-preis/preistraegerinnen-2021/