The Effects of Home Language and Bilingualism on the Realization of Lexical Stress in Welsh and Welsh English.

Ineke Mennen,Niamh Kelly,Robert Mayr,Jonathan Morris

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03038

Abstract

This study investigates effects of long-term language contact and individual linguistic experience on the realization of lexical stress correlates in Welsh and Welsh English. To this end, a production study was carried out in which participants were asked to read out Welsh and English disyllabic words with stress on the penultimate syllable, placed within carrier phrases. Recordings were made of the productions of Welsh and English target words, by two groups of Welsh-English bilinguals differing in home language, as well as the productions of English target words by Welsh English monolinguals and speakers of Southern Standard British English (SSBE). Acoustic measures were taken of fundamental frequency (f0) and intensity ratios of stressed and unstressed vowels, duration of stressed and unstressed vowels, and duration of the post-stress consonant. The results of acoustic comparisons of Welsh English with SSBE and Welsh revealed that SSBE differs from the other groups in all measures of lexical stress. Welsh and Welsh English, however, show considerable phonetic overlap, albeit with language-specific differences in two of the five measures (unstressed vowel duration, intensity ratio). These findings suggest cross-language convergence in the realization of lexical stress in Welsh and Welsh English disyllabic words with penultimate stress. Individual linguistic experience, in turn, did not play a major role in the realization of lexical stress in these words. Bilinguals did not differ from monolinguals when speaking English, and home language also had no effect on any measure. This suggests that other factors must be responsible for the observed patterns. We discuss the possibility that the varieties of Welsh and Welsh English spoken in this community function as a sign of regional or peer group identity, rather than as markers of linguistic experience.

Highlights

A common by-product of bilingualism is that of cross-linguistic interaction, where features from one language are transferred to or influence the other language
This study investigated the acoustic correlates of lexical stress produced by monolingual and bilingual adolescent males attending the Sixth Form of a bilingual school in Carmarthenshire, West Wales
We aimed to determine how monolingual speakers of Welsh English realize lexical stress and to what extent their production differs from Welsh on the one hand and Southern Standard British English (SSBE) on the other

Summary

Introduction

A common by-product of bilingualism is that of cross-linguistic interaction ( sometimes referred to as interference or transfer), where features from one language are transferred to or influence the other language (see Treffers-Daller and Mougeon, 2005, for a discussion). In bilingual speech production, such cross-linguistic interaction commonly results in a ‘merging’ of Lexical Stress in Welsh and Welsh English the phonetic properties of the first (L1) and second (L2) language, with phonetic values that are often intermediate between the monolingual values of the two languages (as evidenced by studies of segmental, e.g., Flege and Eefting, 1987; Flege, 1995; Kehoe, 2002, as well as prosodic aspects of speech production, e.g., Queen, 1996; Elordieta and Calleja, 2005; Mennen et al, 2014) This phonetic divergence from monolinguals has been attributed to a number of extra-linguistic factors. One of these is age of acquisition (e.g., Asher and Garcia, 1969; Flege et al, 1999; Piske and MacKay, 1999), either due to maturational constraints (an age-related loss of neural plasticity which causes declines in language learning ability, c.f. Long, 1990; Højen and Flege, 2006) or because it may interact with other factors such as chronological age or amount of L1 and L2 use (c.f. Flege et al, 1997; Flege, 2007)

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