When your native language sounds foreign : a phonetic investigation into first language attrition

The research presented in this thesis comprises two experiments which investigated\nwhether the domain of phonetics can undergo first language attrition, or be lost, when a\nsecond language is acquired in adulthood in a migrant context.\nExperiment I investigated the native speech of 57 German migrants to Anglophone\nCanada and the Dutch Netherlands. The bilingual migrants had grown up in a monolingual\nGerman environment and moved abroad in adolescence or adulthood. Their semispontaneous\nGerman speech was globally assessed for foreign accent by native German\nspeakers in Germany. It was revealed that 14 bilingual migrants were perceived to be\nnon-native speakers of German. Age of arrival to Canada or the Netherlands and contact\nwith one’s native language played the most significant roles in determining whether the\nGerman speech of the migrants was assessed to be foreign accented. Crucially, it was not\nonly the amount of contact, but also the type of contact which influenced foreign accented\nnative speech. Monolingual settings, in which little language mixing was assumed to occur,\nwere most conducive to maintaining non-foreign accented native German speech.\nThese findings prompted Experiment II, in which the speech of 10 German migrants\nto Anglophone Canada was examined in fine phonetic detail. The participants in this\nexperiment had similarly grown up in a German speaking environment and migrated to\nCanada in late adolescence or adulthood. Segmental and prosodic elements of speech,\nwhich generally differ between German and English, were selected for acoustic analyses.\nGiven that each phonetic element was measured according to two dimensions, it was possible\nto determine that in the lateral phoneme /l/, the frequency of F1 was more likely to\nevidence first language attrition than the frequency of F2; and that in the prenuclear rise,\nthe alignment of the start of the rise was more likely to display first language attrition than\nthe alignment of the end. In addition to intrapersonal variation within the same phonetic\nvariable, interpersonal variation was observed. Two participants evidenced no first language\nattrition, whilst one participant realised both dimensions of the lateral phoneme /l/\nand prenuclear tonal alignment according to the Englishmonolingual norm in his German.\nWhen extralinguistic variables were investigated, age of arrival (and neither amount nor\ntype of language contact) had a significant impact on determining first language attrition,\nalthough this effect was only observed in the alignment of the prenuclear rise.\nWhile the experiments revealed stability in the native speech of late consecutive bilingual\nmigrants, first language attrition in the domain of phonetics was observed at both the\nlevel of perception and performance. Taken together, these findings challenge the traditional\nconcept of native speech by revealing that indeed native speakers diverge from the\nnorms of native (monolingual) speech.

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