Description:

Linguistics Colloquium Series: Mark Amengual

Affiliation: University of California Santa Cruz

Topic: Long-term and short-term phonetic interactions in bilingual and trilingual speech

Multilingual individuals do not completely “switch off” the language that is not required in a given communicative context (or experimental task). Instead, the representations of each language are simultaneously activated to a certain degree, creating competition between the languages during speech production and perception. As a result of this language co-activation, a deviation of the target phonetic implementation towards the non-target language(s) can be expected. The current project investigates the flexibility of the sound systems of multilingual individuals, with a specific focus on phonetic interactions in bilingual and trilingual speech. In this talk I will present data on the acoustic realization of L2 learners, L3 learners, and Heritage speakers to examine static and dynamic interlingual influence in the acquisition of L2 and L3 sound systems. The talk will conclude with several  methodological and theoretical considerations and offer an outlook toward future directions.