Programm 75. StuTS

It is well-known that L2 speakers, especially those living in an L2-speaking environment, experience L2>L1 influence. Many factors influencing such cross-linguistic influence (CLI) have been proposed, e.g. duration of immersion in the L2-speaking environment, frequency of L1-use, amount of code-switching, and nature of sociolinguistic contexts (professional/private) in which L1 and L2 are used.
The L2-acquisition of collocations is a difficult process said to cause restructuring of the linguistic system. Against this background, the present study analyses acceptability judgements from late German-English bilinguals on German sentences with target collocations consisting of verb + preposition (e.g. träumen von ‘dream of’) and verb + noun (e.g. Entscheidungen treffen ‘make decisions’). The collocations were either grammatical in German, loan translations from English or ungrammatical in both languages. Data from late German-English bilinguals living in an English-speaking country was compared to that from late German-English bilinguals living in a German-speaking country to analyse which factors (i.e. frequency of L1-use; amount of L2-usage; duration of immersion) affected the participants’ judgements.
The results show that speakers living in an English-speaking environment experience higher levels of CLI if they use German rarely and English almost exclusively. This is not the case for the speakers who use German on a daily basis and English for less than seven hours a day. It seems that regular switching between the two languages is a major facilitator for CLI. Additionally, speakers who had lived in an English-speaking environment for six years or longer experienced more CLI, indicating that longer duration of immersion correlates with higher levels of CLI. Furthermore, speakers living in a German-speaking environment display more CLI if they regularly use English for more than one hour a day – this suggests that switching between languages causes higher CLI than linguistic immersion.

In this talk, I will introduce the research I conducted for my Bachelor's dissertation at the University of Cambridge. If the time allows, the linguistic factors influencing CLI will also be outlined, as these provide fascinating impulses for potential future research.

Info

Tag: 10.05.2024
Anfangszeit: 16:00
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: Squid (33.0.008)
Track: Neuro- and Psycholinguistics
Sprache: en

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