Tanja Kupisch

University of Konstanz | Uni-Konstanz · Department of Linguistics

This study investigates the accents of German-Italian school children (6–10 years old) in their two languages. We ask whether accents in the bilingual children’s two languages are related and how foreign accentedness is associated with proficiency in other areas of language (speech rate, vocabulary size) and extralinguistic factors (formal and info...

In this paper, we investigate the acquisition of optional pragmatic marking, focusing on lexical and morpho-syntactic markers used in rhetorical questions, a type of non-canonical questions. Rhetorical questions in Italian may be marked, among others, by particles (ma ‘but’, e ‘and’, mai ‘ever’) and verbal morphology (conditional, affective reflexi...

This paper accounts for the development and initial validation of a yes/no vocabulary test of North Sámi called North Sámi Vocabulary Test (NSVT). North Sámi (NS) is an Indigenous language spoken in northern Scandinavia. Being an endangered language, NS is in need of revitalisation efforts. One contribution is the provision of proficiency assessmen...

In today’s global society, an increasing number of people speak a few widely spoken languages enjoying high standardisation and official recognition. Meanwhile, minority and local languages are gaining interest from specialists and society. This volume explores the rich topic of bi(dia)lectal repertoires, focusing on their grammatical as well as at...

This study compares the self-perception of first (L1) and second (L2) language competence and dyslexia awareness in two groups of dyslexic students, one German and one Italian, learning English as a second language. Based on a survey, we investigate the relationship between students’ self-perception of their L1 and L2 competence, and how perceived...

In this article we investigate transfer in the ab-initio acquisition of grammatical gender in two groups of multilingual learners. The first group knows two gender languages (German and French), which can potentially act as transfer sources; the second group knows three (German, French and Italian). Both groups had to assign gender to nouns in Fran...

Few studies have examined global foreign accent (GFA) in bilingual children, and little is known about how GFA changes over time and what factors determine change. Here, we examine GFA trajectories in Japanese–English bilingual returnees (Japanese children who returned to Japan after having lived in a majority English environment for several years)...

In this chapter we discuss how early and late bilinguals (Lers) acquire genericity, and in particular generic noun phrases (NPs).

This study focuses on the contexts of language experience in relation to language dominance in eighty-seven Italian–German primary school children in Germany using the MAIN narrative task. We compare current language experience in the heritage language (Italian) and the majority language (German) in both formal and informal settings, and we examine...

Rhetorical questions (RhQs) are a complex phenomenon at the interface of pragmatics, prosody and syntax, which requires reasoning on intentions and goals, and which involves a mismatch between literal and intended meaning. In Italian, RhQs can be marked by optional particles and verbal morphology. We investigated when children aged 6-9 acquire the...

While there is growing awareness that knowledge of regional minority languages must be protected, assessing the vitality of such varieties is challenging due to the lack of assessment materials. Our contribution documents the creation and validation of LexVEN, a bimodal yes/no vocabulary task, with the purpose of assessing the proficiency of users...

In our increasingly multilingual modern world, understanding how languages beyond the first are acquired and processed at a brain level is essential to design evidence-based teaching, clinical interventions and language policy. Written by a team of world-leading experts in a wide range of disciplines within cognitive science, this Handbook provides...

In our increasingly multilingual modern world, understanding how languages beyond the first are acquired and processed at a brain level is essential to design evidence-based teaching, clinical interventions and language policy. Written by a team of world-leading experts in a wide range of disciplines within cognitive science, this Handbook provides...

It has been increasingly acknowledged that regional languages and dialects bear similarities with heritage languages, and that some heritage speakers are bilectal with two closely related minority languages or dialects. However, assessing the knowledge of non-standard varieties proves difficult due to the lack of assessment materials. Our contribut...

Introduction Language policies are often aimed at changing language behaviours, yet it is notoriously difficult to assess their effects. This study investigates language use and competence in the Indigenous Sámi populations of Norway and Sweden in light of the national-level policies the two countries have adopted. Methods We provide a cross-count...

Aims and objectives This article investigates naturalistic acquisition of a second dialect (D2), comparing the global accent of speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) exposed to European Portuguese (EP), either as children or as adults (early vs late bilectals). The focus is on the predicted advantage of an early age of onset of the D2, as well as p...

Every two weeks, one of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages dies. Yet what are the consequences of having to give up one’s native language? Speakers of minority languages worldwide face barriers to using their languages outside their homes, often with negative consequences for educational and economic success. A new survey of the Indigenous Sámi...

In their epistemological article, Grenoble and Osipov (2023, henceforth G&O) touch on some of the practical and ideological difficulties in working with Indigenous communities, in particular in relation to their work with the Even communities in northeastern Russia. They mention low speaker numbers and the associated challenge of obtaining sufficie...

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker’s belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and lexica...

Herein, we contextualize, problematize, and offer some insights for moving beyond the problem of monolingual comparative normativity in (psycho) linguistic research on bilin-gualism. We argue that, in the vast majority of cases, juxtaposing (functional) monolin-guals to bilinguals fails to offer what the comparison is supposedly intended to do: mee...

The appendix includes the list of experimental items, the instructions to the comprehension task and the model specifications and results of the statistical analyses.

Die sprachlichen Ressourcen herkunftsbedingt mehrsprachiger Fremdsprachenlerner in Deutschland speisen sich grundsätzlich aus drei Quellen: Erstens sind sie Sprecher mindestens einer Herkunftssprache, die im natürlichen Umfeld erworben wurde, im familiären Umfeld verwendet wird und gegebenenfalls Förderung durch herkunftssprachlichen Unterricht erf...

Models on L3/Ln acquisition differ with respect to how they envisage degree (holistic vs. selective transfer of the L1, L2 or both) and/or timing (initial stages vs. development) of how the influence of source languages unfolds. This study uses EEG/ERPs to examine these models, bringing together two types of bilinguals: heritage speakers (HSs) (Ita...

In this study, we investigate gender marking on German real and nonce words by monolingual children as well as German-Russian children, who grow up in Germany as heritage speakers of Russian. We ask whether the children use phonological and/or structural cues to assign nominal gender or rely on their lexical knowledge. To this end, we designed thre...

There has been a substantial amount of research on heritage language acquisition and diachronic change. Although recent work has increasingly pointed to parallels between those two areas, it remains unclear how systematic these are. In this paper, we provide a bird's eye view, illustrating how patterns of diachronic change are mirrored in heritage...

The paper investigates the use of PPs, specifically prepositions and the case marking on their DP arguments, in moribund North American (heritage) Icelandic (NAmIce), using data from a map task experiment. Since prepositional phrases combine semantic properties with morpho-syntactic properties, PPs allow us to investigate the relative vulnerability...

This study brings together two previously largely independent fields of multilingual language acquisition: heritage language and third language (L3) acquisition. We investigate the production of fortis and lenis stops in semi-naturalistic speech in the three languages of 20 heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with German as a majority language and E...

We investigate German–Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system, where...

Previous research has shown that the two languages of early bilingual children can influence each other, depending on the linguistic property, while adult bilinguals predominantly show influence from the majority language to the minority (heritage) language. While this observed shift in influence patterns is probably related to a shift in dominance...

This study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in the acquisition of embedded wh-questions in L3 English in German-dominant heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. Specifically, we investigate whether a higher proficiency in the heritage language Italian increases the potential for CLI from that language. To this end, 21 adult-aged Italian-German...

In the Romance languages, definite plural articles (e.g., le rane ‘the frogs’) are generally ambiguous between a generic and a specific interpretation, and speakers must reconstruct the intended interpretation through the linguistic or extra-linguistic context. Following the “polar bear” paradigm implemented in Czypionka & Kupisch (2019)’s investig...

This paper provides an overview of Germanic languages as heritage languages, i.e. languages acquired naturalistically by children in parts of the world where these languages are not the majority language. Summarizing research on different types of heritage speakers of Danish, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, we identify certain stable and...

In heritage language (HL) bilingualism, recent work has focused on understanding the dynamic effects that different input types can have on heritage language development and outcomes (e.g., Bayram et al., 2017; Kupisch & Rothman, 2018; Polinsky, 2018; Putnam & Sanchez, 2013; Karayayla & Schmid, 2019). The underlying question is to what extent one’s...

In this paper, we consider elicited production data (real and nonce words tasks) from five different studies on the acquisition of grammatical gender in Heritage Russian, comparing children growing up in Germany, Israel, Norway, Latvia, and the United Kingdom. The children grow up in diverse heritage language backgrounds, ranging from small groups...

Like Einstein's general theory of relativity is concerned with explaining the basics of an observable experience – i.e., gravity – most people take for granted that Chomsky's theory of generative grammar (GG) is concerned with the basic nature of language. This chapter highlights a mere subset of central constructs in GG, showing how they have feat...

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 I...

According to the literature, German optionally allows a definite article with generic nominals, whereas other Germanic languages require a bare nominal (e.g., English Polar bears are white). This optionality makes German different from other Germanic languages and more similar to Romance languages, in which definite articles are obligatory with gen...

This paper discusses the interplay between acquisition and theory construction. It endeavors to show how a more direct and crucially bi‐directional relationship between formal linguistic theory and the study of heritage language bilingualism can provide mutual benefit. It will be argued that data from acquisition—not exclusively but indeed especial...

Towards modelling heritage speakers' sound systems - Volume 23 Issue 1 - Tanja Kupisch

Herein, we provide counterargumentation to some of Domínguez, Hicks, and Slabakova's claims that the term incomplete acquisition is conceptually necessary on theoretical grounds for describing the outcome grammars of heritage language bilingualism. Specifically, we clarify their claim that previous challenging of the term in our and others’ work is...

This study investigates perceived accent in the two early-acquired languages of 21 adult-aged bilinguals with Italian as the heritage language (HL) and German as the majority language (ML). We test the relative ability of ‘AoO in German’ (range=0-6 years) and ‘Italian use’ to predict perceived nativeness in Italian and German. Two accent rating exp...

The original version of this chapter was inadvertently published with incorrect chapter author’s affiliation.

This Special Issue (SI) is dedicated to early bilinguals, who acquire two languages during early childhood, before age 6, simultaneously (2L1 bilinguals) or sequentially (cL2 bilinguals) . Recently, the notion of heritage speakers (HSs) − bilinguals who grow up speaking a minority language at home − has become prominent in this context. HS research...

The present chapter traces the development of language acquisition planning. It begins by considering the work of Robert L. Cooper, who placed language acquisition planning alongside corpus planning and status planning as a fundamental type of language planning. While corpus planning focuses on language form and status planning on language function...

The rise of scientific inquiry focusing on bilingualism over the past few decades has also borne witness to an increase in the study of individuals and communities who speak a native language that is not the sociolinguistically dominant language of the environment in which they grew up. While it is common practice to refer to these diverse groups a...

This paper discusses the role of different factors determining the linguistic competence of heritage speakers (HSs) based on examples from speakers who speak a Romance language (French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish) as heritage language (HL) and German as the environmental language. Since the relative amount of contact with the HL and the enviro...

In the sociopolitics of language, sometimes yesterday’s solution is tomorrow’s problem. This volume examines the evolving nature of language acquisition planning through a collection of papers that consider how decisions about language learning and teaching are mediated by a confluence of psychological, ideological, and historical forces. The first...

This book presents a current state-of-affairs regarding the study of cross-linguistic influence in bilingualism. Taking Hulk and Müller’s (2000) and Müller and Hulk’s (2001) hypotheses on cross-linguistic influence as a starting point, the book exemplifies the shift from the original focus on syntax proper to interfaces and discourse phenomena in t...

Determining how and why adult outcomes of heritage speaker (HS) bilingualism differ from monolinguals is difficult because it requires the reconstruction of developmental paths from end-state data. In an effort to address this issue, we examine HSs of Turkish in Germany at an early age of development (10–15 years old, n = 22), as well as age-matche...

This study is concerned with L3 acquisition in heritage speakers (HSs). The goals are to incorporate HS into L3 acquisition research and investigate the role of language dominance for predicting L3 transfer. We analyze global accent in German-Turkish early bilinguals, HSs of Turkish, who acquired English as their L3. Twenty native-speaker judges de...

The aim of this study is to investigate whether native speakers of Gallipolino, bilectals who have acquired Gallipolino as L1 (together with standard Italian) in their childhood, who have left Gallipoli after puberty and currently use standard Italian as their primary language, display effects of attrition with respect to subordinate clauses embedd...

This paper integrates research on child simultaneous bilingual acquisition more directly into the heritage language acquisition literature. The child simultaneous bilingual literature mostly focuses on development in childhood, whereas heritage speakers are often tested at an endstate in adulthood. However, insights from child simultaneous bilingua...

This paper reports on a study investigating restrictions on definiteness (the Definiteness Effect) in existential constructions in the two languages of Turkish heritage speakers in Germany. Turkish and German differ in in how the Definiteness Effect plays out. Definite expressions in German may not occur in affirmative or negative existentials, whe...

This study addresses the production of Voice Onset Time (VOT) in French as a foreign language (FFL). The learners are young multilingual learners who speak Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language along with German. To determine potential effects of the learners’ multilingual background, these multilingual learners were compared to three control gro...

This study investigates subject use in [-topic shift] and [+topic shift] contexts in Standard Italian and Venetian two close varieties which differ in their use of overt and null pronouns. In an acceptability judgment, we compare two groups of bilectals in their two varieties: children aged 7-12 years, divided in strong and weak dialect speakers, a...

This paper discusses the role of different factors determining the linguistic competence of heritage speakers (HSs) based on examples from speakers who speak a Romance language (French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish) as heritage language (HL) and German as the environmental language. Since the relative amount of contact with the HL and the enviro...

With contributions from leading scholars of bilingualism, Language Dominance in Bilinguals is the first publication to survey different approaches to language dominance, along with suggested avenues for further research. It illustrates how a critical approach to the notion of language dominance, as well as its operationalisation and measurement, ca...

This study is concerned with the distribution of the definite article in German with plural nominals that have a generic reading . In Standard German, genericity is typically expressed by bare nouns (Tiger sind gefährlich ‘Tigers are dangerous’). Many researchers have claimed that there is variation in article use in the expression of generic refe...

Aims and objectives In this study, we investigated crosslinguistic influence in the phonetic systems of simultaneous bilinguals (2L1s) during adulthood. Methodology Specifically, we analyzed the voice onset time (VOT) of the voiceless stop /k/ in the spontaneous speech of 14 German–French bilinguals who grew up in France or Germany. We looked at b...

The present study is concerned with global foreign accent (FA) in heritage speakers (HS). Specifically, we investigate whether (i) HS acquire a native accent in both languages and (ii) whether age of onset (AoO) is relevant. FA was examined in 21 adult HS of Turkish in Germany (AoO in German 0–9 years). FA was assessed for both languages with 15 mo...

The study reported in this paper examines foreign accent (FA) in adult simultaneous bilinguals (2L1ers). Specifically, we investigate how accent is affected if a first language is acquired as a minority (heritage) language as compared to a majority (dominant) language. We compare the perceived FA in both languages of 38 adult 2L1ers (German-French...

The present study investigates the question of whether early successive Turkish-German bilinguals have a native accent in one or both of their languages, or whether a native accent in one language implies a foreign accent (FA) in the other language. Speech samples of 21 adult bilinguals were rated by 15 native speakers in two experiments, one for e...

Cross-linguistic influence (CLI) has been claimed to occur under the conditions of structural overlap, interfacing, syntactic complexity and language dominance. This study tested adjective placement in the Italian of 19 adult German–Italian simultaneous bilinguals, comparing naturalistic and experimental data. The results show no CLI from German, a...

This study investigates the adult grammars of French simultaneous bilingual speakers (2LIs) whose other language is German. Apart from providing an example of French as heritage language in Europe, the goals of this paper are (i) to compare the acquisition of French in a minority and majority language context, (ii) to identify the relative vulnerab...

This paper is concerned with gender marking in adult French. Four groups of subjects are compared: German-French simultaneous bilinguals (2L1ers) who grew up in France, German-French 2L1ers who grew up in Germany, advanced second language learners (L2ers) who are resident either in France or in Germany at the time of testing. The major goal of the...

This study investigates subject nominals in German in adult simultaneous bilinguals (2L1s) with French or Italian as the other language, focusing on plural and mass nouns with a definite article. These have a specific interpretation in written Standard German, while they are ambiguous between a specific and a generic interpretation in the Romance l...

L3 acquisition has been a topic of increasing interest throughout the past decade. Nevertheless, linguistically-oriented work has so far paid little attention to the acquisition of foreign languages by second generation minority (or heritage) speakers, who have acquired two languages in early childhood. Our paper investigates article acquisition by...

Rapidly increasing migration flows contribute to the development of multiple forms of social and cultural differentiation in urban areas – or to ‘super-diversity’. Language diversity is an important part of the resulting new social and cultural constellations. Although linguistic diversity is not a new phenomenon per se, the response of individuals...

This study investigates definite articles in specific and generic subject nominals in Italian spoken by adult simultaneous bilinguals (2L1ers) and second language learners (L2ers). The study focuses on plural and mass DPs, in which German and Italian differ. The aims are to (i) compare acquisition outcomes between the weaker and the stronger langua...