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Article published In:
Language, Interaction and Acquisition
Vol. 10:2 (2019) ► pp.177–203

The production of geminates in Italian-dominant bilinguals and heritage speakers of Italian

| University of Konstanz
| Lund University
| University of Konstanz | UiT, Arctic University of Norway

This study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in adult Italian-German bilinguals based on the production of gemination, a phenomenon that exists in Italian but not in German. We analyzed the spontaneous Italian speech of two groups of Italian-German bilinguals (heritage speakers of Italian and Italian-dominant bilinguals) and a monolingual Italian control group. The results show that the geminates produced by the speakers in both bilingual groups were longer than their singletons. From this it seems that gemination is not affected by CLI. Based on our results, we discuss whether CLI is determined by (1) markedness, (2) frequency of Italian input during acquisition, (3) language dominance or (4) relevance (e.g. phonemic status), concluding that the latter is most crucial.

Keywords: gemination, heritage bilingualism, Italian, German, cross-linguistic influence
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The sound systems of heritage speakers
    • 2.1Global accent in adult HSs
    • 2.2Segmental and supra-segmental aspects of adult HSs pronunciation
  • 3.Gemination
    • 3.1Geminates in Italian
    • 3.2Geminates in language acquisition
  • 4.Aims and predictions
  • 5.Participants and methods
    • 5.1Participants and their accent profiles
    • 5.2Method
      • 5.2.1Recordings
      • 5.2.2Acoustic measurements
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1Speech rate
    • 6.2Description of consonant and vowel duration by speakers
    • 6.3Statistical analysis
  • 7.Summary and discussion
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lia.18015.ein
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