How and when is prosody transferred? (completed)

About the project

The aim of this project is to enhance our understanding of prosodic aspects of multilingualism. More specifically, I will discuss the degree and the nature of prosodic transfers in the light of language attitudes, typology and differences between L2/L3 acquisition on the basis recordings of spontaneous L2 French and L3 Norwegian speech produced by trilingual Congolese immigrants in Norway whose L1 are Lingala or Swahili. The latter belong to different typological categories of prosodic systems: Lingala is a lexical tone language whereas Swahili has fixed stress.

Data

The data will consist of recordings of three different conversations:

1. a conversation I Norwegian where the speakers communicate with a Norwegian L1 speaker
2. a conversation in French where the inter-speaker is a French L1-user
3. an interview where they tell their linguistic autobiography

Conversations 1) and 2) will analyzed acoustically and the results will be seen in the light of the linguistic history and attitudes that are revealed in conversation 3).

Analysis

The analyses will focus on three aspects of the data:

1. transfers (for instance, differences between Lingala L1 speakers and Swahili L1 speakers, transfers from L2 to L3 or vice versa)
2. competence and use (for instance, the impact of factors such as exposition, order of acquisition etc. on prosodic competence)
3. prosody and language ideology (for instance,to what extent are prosodic features used as identity markers?)

Duration

2013–2016