Multilingual acquisition of vowels in L1 Polish, L2 Danish and L3 English

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to determine whether all languages in the linguistic repertoire of a multilingual speaker manifest cross-linguistic influence (CLI) and establish the directions of CLI on the basis of chosen vowels from the linguistic repertoire of two groups: the Bilingual group (L1 Polish/L2 Danish) and the Multilingual group (L1 Polish/L2 Danish/L3 English). The results show that L1 Polish vowels are higher and fronter as a result of the influence of L2 Danish and L3 English. L2 Danish vowels are backer as a result of L1 Polish. Also, L3 English vowels are produced on target, possibly due to combined CLI from L1 and L2. The only direction of CLI that is not observed is from L3 to L2. The existence of a global language system is postulated, which should be treated as one entity whose characteristics depend on the characteristics of its component languages. Each component language has unique features because it is influenced by other component languages in a particular global language system. It is shown that the L1 of a bilingual group is different from the same L1 of a multilingual group because the latter also has a third component language.

KEYWORDS:

• Vowel formants
• vowel midpoint
• cross-linguistic influence
• multilingualism
• third language acquisition
• Danish
• Polish

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Dewaele (1998) defines lexical inventions as ‘words which are morpho-phonologically adapted to the TL but which are never used by native speakers’ (p. 471).

2. The baseline in this study consists of speakers of Polish, speakers of Danish and speakers of English who live in their respective L1 countries and only use their L1. They do not speak any foreign language on a daily basis nor are they fluent in any. However, they all have had instruction in one or two foreign languages. The baseline does not consist of monolingual speakers because the author of the paper claims that it would be impossible to find monolingual speakers of Polish, Danish or English.

3. The hypotheses regarding the component languages and global language systems are explained in detail in Sypiańska (2013).

4. The study presented in this article is part of a larger investigation described in more detail in Sypiańska (2013).

5. Spontaneous speech was used in order to divert the participants’ attention from language form. In citation, the participant may pay more conscious attention to the language they produce. On the other hand, due to the fact that spontaneous speech implies communicative intent, it directs this conscious attention from the form to the content of the message. It was assumed that spontaneous speech may be useful in capturing even the arguably weaker CLI to L1 (as compared to the L2).

6. According to Dziubalska-Kołaczyk and Weckwerth (2012), a non-prototypical native speaker is a person who knows a foreign language, yet uses only their first language. In opposition, a prototypical native speaker is a person who does not know any foreign languages. The latter would be very challenging to find in practice among Poles, Danes or the English. Although the speakers whose speech serves as the control in this study know a foreign language, they do not use it, as opposed to the participants of the study who use one or two foreign languages (Danish and/or English).

7. This observation was repeated by nearly all participants during the experiment.

8. The same effect was visible for VOT values of voiceless plosives in the same speaker groups (Sypiańska, 2013).