Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 13 (1), 2010, 33–40 C  Cambridge University Press 2009 doi:10.1017/S1366728909990289 33 The effects of contact on native language pronunciation in an L2 migrant setting ∗ ESTHER DE LEEUW University of the West of England, Bristol MONIKA S. SCHMID Rijksuniversiteit Groningen INEKE MENNEN Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Bangor University (Received: May 16, 2006; Revised: May 16, 2008; Accepted: May 16, 2008; First published online 7 October 2009) The primary aim of this study was to determine whether native speakers of German living in either Canada or the Netherlands are perceived to have a foreign accent in their native German speech. German monolingual listeners (n = 19) assessed global foreign accent of 34 L1 German speakers in Anglophone Canada, 23 L1 German speakers in the Dutch Netherlands, and five German monolingual controls in Germany. The experimental subjects had moved to either Canada or the Netherlands at an average age of 27 years and had resided in their country of choice for an average of 37 years. The results revealed that the German listeners were more likely to perceive a global foreign accent in the German speech of the consecutive bilinguals in Anglophone Canada and the Dutch Netherlands than in the speech of the control group and that nine immigrants to Canada and five immigrants to the Netherlands were clearly perceived to be non-native speakers of German. Further analysis revealed that quality and quantity of contact with the native German language had a more significant effect on predicting global foreign accent in native speech than age of arrival or length of residence. Two types of contact were differentiated: (i) C−M represented communicative settings in which little code-mixing between the L1 and L2 was expected to occur, and (ii) C+M represented communicative settings in which code-mixing was expected to be more likely. The variable C−M had a significant impact on predicting foreign accent in native speech, whereas the variable C+M did not. The results suggest that contact with the L1 through communicative settings in which code-mixing is inhibited is especially conducive to maintaining the stability of native language pronunciation in consecutive bilinguals living in a migrant context. Introduction The majority of research into first language (L1) attrition in adults has addressed linguistic levels such as the morphology, syntax, semantics and lexicon of the native language system (Bullock and Gerfen, 2004a, b; K¨ opke, 2004), while phonetic and phonological aspects of L1 attrition in adults have only been investigated in isolated studies. Previous investigations suggest that specific phonetic elements in a native language system can diverge from the native language norm when a second language is acquired in adulthood. For example, Flege (1987) found that a bi- directional effect occurred in the stop consonant /t/ both in American speakers who had been immersed in a French- * We are immensely grateful to the participants of this study, who generously donated their time and provided an insight into their personal languages, and lives. We are also indebted to Herbert Masthoff and Jens-Peter K¨ oster for supporting the perception experiment at the University of Trier, and to two anonymous reveiwers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. The original data collection was supported through NWO grant No. 275-70-005 and the perception experiment was supported through a Ph.D. scholarship held at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. Address for correspondence: Esther de Leeuw, Department of Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, University of the West of England, Bristol, Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol, BS16 1QY, UK esther.deleeuw@uwe.ac.uk speaking community in France and in French speakers who had been living in the United States for over a decade. In both cases, the characteristic voice onset time (VOT) of their native language became more like the VOT of their second language, decreasing for American English native speakers and increasing for native French speakers. Flege (1987, p. 62) concluded that phonetic properties of similar L1 and L2 phones were “merged”. Major (1992) reported a similar phenomenon in his population of five American English native speakers in Brazil. Consistent with Flege’s results, the VOT of these immigrants became shorter and more Portuguese-like in their native English speech. With regard to prosodic elements of speech, Mennen (2004) found bi-directional interference in the intonation of Dutch native speakers living in the Netherlands who were at a near-native level in their acquisition of Greek as an L2. These speakers, who had learned Greek in early adulthood, were not only unable to realize Greek tonal alignment authentically, they also showed a change in their native Dutch tonal alignment patterns under the influence of Greek. More specifically, the differentiation in the alignment of pitch peaks across Dutch long and short vowels was greatly reduced in their L1 speech. Hence, previous studies suggest that specific phonetic elements in a native language system can diverge from a stable https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728909990289 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. YBP Library Services, on 28 Aug 2018 at 14:10:40, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.