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English language and linguistics research seminar: Tanja Kupish (Lund University): Foreign accent in native speakers— When and why heritage speakers acquire foreign accents
Abstract
Benmamoun et al. (2013: 140) observed that research on heritage speakers’ (HS) phonology has “barely scratched the surface”. Heritage speakers are speakers of a minority language, who often become dominant in the national language of their environment. I present several studies on the perceived accents of HSs during childhood and adulthood, showing that children and adults are deemed native-like in the majority language (often their L2), while perceived nativeness in the minority language is subject to individual variation. The data suggest that children benefit from an early age of onset, but that these AoO effects get overridden by language experience throughout the lifespan. Moreover, there appears to be an asymmetry between perception and production skills, suggesting that production is affected by crosslinguistic influence between the bilinguals’ two languages, despite the existence of two independent (and monolingual-like) perception systems.