Assessing foreign language speech rhythm in multilingual learners

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Assessing foreign language speech rhythm in multilingual learners

An interdisciplinary approach*

Christoph Gabriel, Johanna Stahnke & Jeanette ThulkeUniversity of Hamburg

The present study investigates the rhythmic properties of the non-native speech produced by multilingual learners with Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language who acquire French and English as foreign languages in the German school context. Data collected from monolingual German and monolingual Chinese learners serve as control materials. For the production of the syllable-timed speech rhythm of French, it is shown that monolingual learners with (syllable-timed) Mandarin Chinese as L1 perform more target-like than learners with (stress-timed) German as L1, while the latter produce the stress-timed rhythm of the foreign language English in a more target-like way. The multilingual learners with Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language obtain intermediate values for both French and English, as a function of their personal attitudes towards the languages of the sample and depending on the degree of multilingual and phonological awareness. We conclude that, in addition to linguistic factors such as the syllable- or stress-timedness of the languages involved, cross-linguistic influence in prosody is also constrained by certain extra-linguistic factors. Depending on the interplay of these factors, the multilingual learners can have an advantage over the German monolinguals in learning French and over the

* The data analyzed for the present study were collected within the scope of the project “The influence of the background language Mandarin Chinese on the learning of further languages: Linguistic and educational perspectives”, funded by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg as part of the cluster of excellence (federal level) “Linguistic Diversity Manage-ment in Urban Areas” (LiMA). We are grateful for this financial support. Above all, we are deeply indebted to Adelheid Hu (University of Luxembourg), who co-directed the project at an earlier stage, for fruitful discussions on methodological issues. Further thanks go to Lan Diao (University of Hamburg), especially for her substantial help with the data collection in Beijing (May 2012). Last but not least, we would like to thank our student assistants Annette Armbrust, Rebekka Constantin, Birte Dorau, Pauline Gaillot, Jonas Grünke, Hongguang Liu, and Duygu Murathanoğlu (all University of Hamburg) for their help with transcribing and segmenting the materials.

© 2015. John Benjamins Publishing CompanyAll rights reserved

Christoph Gabriel, Johanna Stahnke & Jeanette Thulke

Chinese monolinguals in learning English in that the speech rhythm of their background languages may be positively transferred to the foreign languages. Our findings suggest that a multilingual linguistic background constitutes no disadvantage for the learning of foreign languages and that multilingual and phonological awareness should be promoted in contexts of foreign language learning in both learners and teachers.

Keywords: speech rhythm; intonation; phonological awareness; multilingual awareness; think-aloud protocol

. Introducing the field: Multilingual transfer and foreign language learning

There can no longer be any doubt that linguistic and cultural diversity have become a typical condition of foreign language learning and teaching. This especially holds for present-day school settings in urban spaces in Germany, where about a third of all children have a migration background and grow up multilingually (see, e.g. Elsner 2010: 99). As a consequence, the aims of foreign language instruction become more and more diverse, i.e. in addition to communicative skills in the foreign languages learned at school, plurilingual competencies as well as metalin-guistic and language learning awareness have recently gained in importance.

The learning of a foreign language is by nature linked to phenomena of cross-linguistic influence or – more precisely – crucially characterized by nega-tive or positive transfer from a native to a non-native system. For our purposes, we adopt the widely accepted definition of transfer proposed by Odlin (1989) who characterizes it as “the influence resulting from the similarities and differ-ences between the target language and any other language that has been previ-ously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired” (27); for an overview see also Odlin (2003). Negative transfer is to be understood as the non-target-like transference of a linguistic structure to the foreign language; the notion of positive transfer, by contrast, refers to the target-like production of a certain property of the lan-guage learned that corresponds to some parallel structure of the learners’ native tongue or some other language acquired beforehand. A large number of stud-ies on transfer address cross-linguistic influence between typologically related languages, mostly from a language pedagogical perspective (e.g. Martinez & Reinfried 2006; Mehlhorn 2008; Meißner & Reinfried 1998). However, the influ-ence of typologically distant (and usually unsystematically acquired) heritage languages has long been disregarded with respect to further foreign language learning, from both a linguistic and a pedagogical perspective (see Hu 2011 for


Foreign language speech rhythm in multilingual learners

an overview). This particularly applies to the field of prosodic phonology, despite the fact that prosody has been shown to considerably contribute to the percep-tion of foreign accent (see, e.g. Boula de Mareüil & Vieru-Dimulescu 2006). At least some studies on the learning of foreign languages by multilingual learners focus on Turkish as a heritage language, mainly taking into account the learners’ reading and understanding competencies (Elsner 2007; Rauch, Jurecka & Hesse 2010). However, typologically distant languages other than Turkish have not yet been taken into account.

In the present paper, we investigate the acquisition of French and English speech rhythm by German senior high school students with Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language. We thus focus on a group of immigrants who nowadays make up important communities in urban spaces in Germany, but are almost completely disregarded in both linguistic research and language pedagogy, maybe not least because of the educational success of Chinese immigrants in the German school system. We focus on rhythmic transfer, thereby concentrating on the question of to what extent the languages that make up the learners’ language background – German as the surrounding and dominant language and Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language – serve as a basis for (positive or negative) transfer in the acquisition of French and English timing patterns. By explicitly combining lin-guistic and educational perspectives, we aim at answering the question of whether extra-linguistic factors such as the learners’ attitudes towards their background languages (German and Mandarin Chinese) on the one hand and the foreign lan-guages (French and English) on the other as well as their individual degree of mul-tilingual and phonological awareness influence the acquisition of speech rhythm in foreign language learning.1

The paper is subdivided in the following sections. We start by characterizing the languages of our sample from a typological perspective, thereby focusing on the similarities and differences between Mandarin Chinese, German, French, and English (Section 2). Section 3 offers an overview of current research on speech rhythm and in particular on the transfer of durational properties in multilingual settings. In Section 4, we present the experimental setting and the results of our empirical study, with special interest given to possible interrelations between lin-guistic and non-linguistic factors. Section 5, finally, provides a summary of the findings and some concluding remarks.

. A positive effect of cross-linguistic awareness on the learning of foreign languages has been evidenced in several studies; see Schmidt (2010) for an overview and Mehlhorn (2008) with special consideration of phonological learning.



. How different is Mandarin Chinese?

The languages of our sample comprise a wide spectrum of typologically and genealogically distinct varieties. Seen from an Indo-European perspective, Mandarin Chinese seems to be maximally distant from English (the first foreign language) as well as from French (second foreign language) and from German (language of instruction at school and surrounding language). An eye-catching feature of ‘otherness’ is related to the use of completely different writing systems: While Mandarin Chinese makes use of a basically logographic script, the so-called 汉字 hànzi ‘Chinese characters’ that represent meaningful units (i.e. lexi-cal or grammatical morphemes) and thus refer to the semantic level, the Latin script used for French, English, and German reflects the phonological level of the languages concerned, though in a more or less abstract way. The visually perceivable distance between Mandarin Chinese on the one hand and French, English, and German on the other corresponds to the genealogical relation-ship between the languages concerned: As a Sino-Tibetan language, Mandarin Chinese is the only language of our sample that does not belong to the Indo- European group. In terms of morphosyntactic typology, Mandarin Chinese is once again set apart from the other languages due to its isolating grammar, which sharply contrasts with the inflecting-fusional structures of French, English, and German.2 The same holds, at least partly, for prosody:3 With regards to intona-tion, Mandarin Chinese is a tone language which allows for the expression of semantic contrasts in monosyllabic and segmentally identical words by means of its four lexical tones.4 The remaining languages, by c ontrast, belong to the group

. As different from inflecting languages, which mark grammatical functions through affixes on lexical stems or by allomorphic variation of the stem itself, the words of isolating languages do not undergo systematic changes. Grammatical information such as, e.g. tense or aspect is not expressed by bound affixes on the verb, but by means of free morphemes such as the per-fective aspect marker 了 le, which may appear either clause-finally or in direct adjacency to the verb, e.g. 爸爸看见老师了 (Bàba kànjiàn lǎoshī le) or 爸爸看见了老师 (Bàba kànjiàn le lǎoshī), both ‘The father saw the teacher’.

. Since the present study concentrates on prosodic phonology we abstain from presenting the segmental properties of the languages involved. Concise descriptions of the phonemic inventories of the languages of our sample are given by Lin (2007: 19–82, Mandarin Chinese), Gut (2009: 50–74, English), Wiese (1996: 9–26, German), and Fagyal, Kibbee, and Jenkins (2006: 23–52, French).

. E.g. the sequence [ ] conveys different lexical meanings as a function of the F0 move-ment produced on the tone-bearing unit: First tone (high): 狮(子) shī(zi) ‘lion’, second tone (rising): 十 shí ‘ten’, third tone (falling-rising): 使 shǐ ‘messenger’, fourth tone (falling): 是 shì ‘to



of so-called “intonation-only languages” (Gussenhoven 2004: 12), which lack tonal marking of semantic contrasts on the word level, but systematically use fundamental frequency (F0) for the marking of lexical stress5 and clause typing (e.g. declarative vs. interrogative structures), for prosodic grouping, and for the expression of paralinguistic meanings. However, turning to the durational prop-erties of the languages under investigation, the picture changes, inasmuch as the syllable-timed speech rhythm of Mandarin Chinese (Lin & Wang 2007) patterns with French, but contrasts with the stress-timed languages German and English (see Section 3). Against this background, it is expectable that the English data produced by learners with a Mandarin Chinese background (native or heritage language) present evidence for rhythmic transfer from syllable-timed Chinese. By contrast, learners with Mandarin Chinese as their L1 or heritage language should perform more target-like concerning the production of the syllable-timed rhythm of French than monolingual German learners do.

. Speech rhythm in multilingual settings

The prosodies of different languages are crucially determined by the systematic use of durational cues and fundamental frequency (F0), i.e. by timing patterns (speech rhythm) and melody (intonation) as well as by the distribution of promi-nences over the speech signal. In languages exhibiting lexical stress (Liberman & Prince 1977), such as German or English, both F0 and timing are linked to pro-sodic prominences on the word level, i.e. to the marking of stressed (or: metri-cally strong) syllables.6 According to the traditional dichotomy established by Pike (1945) and Abercrombie (1967), the languages of the world are classified as being either stress- or syllable-timed.7 Seen from this angle, the perceived contrast

be’. Grammatical morphemes such as the aspect marker 了 le are tonally unspecified (neutral tone). An analysis of the lexical tones in an autosegmental-metrical framework is provided by Duanmu (2007: 236–238).

. Note that this does not hold for French which lacks lexical stress. In contrast to English and German, French intonation is not related to the word level, but to higher levels of the prosodic hierarchy such as the edges of accentual phrases (see, e.g. Jun & Fougeron 2000).

. The role of intensity as the third correlate of stress (besides F0 and duration) will not be considered in our study.

. A third group of languages, among them Japanese as well as probably Ancient Greek and Vedic Sanskrit, is characterized by a regular pacing with respect to the mora as a basic unit of timing. This aspect will be disregarded in the following given that none of the languages under investigation qualifies as being mora-timed (see Fletcher 2010: 529, 553–555).



between the two language types is interpreted as a reflex of the isochrony of dura-tional intervals: In syllable-timed languages such as, e.g. Mandarin Chinese and French, syllabic units tend to be of equal length, whereas stress-timed languages such as, e.g. English or German, present (stress-delimited) feet of the same dura-tion, i.e. these languages exhibit approximately equal durations between the onsets of stressed syllables. After it was shown by Roach (1982) and Dauer (1987), among others, that neither syllable-based nor stress-based isochrony was systematic in the two language groups, research on speech rhythm largely developed in two dif-ferent directions. A first line of investigation mainly relies on phonological aspects and interprets the durational properties of a given language as a surface reflex of its phonological properties such as, e.g. complexity of syllabic structures and the pres-ence or absence of vowel reduction (see, e.g. Dasher & Bolinger 1982; Dauer 1987; Auer & Uhmann 1988; Auer 2001). A second approach is rather surface-oriented and concentrates on the ratio of vocalic (V) and consonantal (C) intervals in the speech signal (Dellwo 2006; Dellwo & Wagner 2003; Grabe & Low 2002, Ramus, Nespor & Mehler 1999; White & Mattys 2007, among many others).8 From this point of view, the perceivable difference between stress- and syllable-timedness is evidenced by different proportions of vocalic material in the stretch of speech analyzed (%V; Ramus, Nespor & Mehler 1999) as well as by the values depicting the durational variability of V and C intervals (so-called rhythm metrics): The non-normalized metrics ΔV and ΔC simply express the standard deviation of V/C intervals (Ramus, Nespor & Mehler 1999); the variation coefficients VarcoV/C are speech-rate-normalized versions of ΔV/C (Dellwo & Wagner 2003); the pair-wise variability index (PVI; Grabe & Low 2002), finally, differs from the afore-mentioned metrics in computing the durational variability in successive intervals instead of calculating it over the whole speech signal.9 According to this approach, languages can be located on a continuum between stress- and syllable-timedness.

. These phonetically based approaches mainly rely on the findings of the influential study by Mehler et al. (1996), who showed that newborns perceive the speech signal mainly as a sequence of V and C intervals. Based on this assumption, Ramus, Nespor and Mehler (1999) suggested that syllables should no longer be interpreted as the basic timing unit of a given language, but rather vocalic and intervocalic, i.e. consonantal intervals.

. In the literature, the PVI has been applied in both its raw, i.e. non-normalized form (rPVI) and in its speech-rate-normalized version (nPVI). Grabe and Low (2002) argued that only vocalic durations are affected by speech rate and consequently suggested using the PVI in its normalized form for V intervals (VnPVI) and in its raw version for C intervals (CrPVI). However, since it was shown that also C intervals may vary according to speech rate (Dellwo & Wagner 2003) the normalized PVI has also been applied for consonantal durations (CnPVI; see, e.g. Kinoshita & Sheppard 2011).



In the past ten years, research on the rhythmic properties of non-native speech and contact varieties has considerably increased. In the context of foreign language learning, transfer of the durational properties from a native to a non-native system has been attested in studies on pairs of languages that belong to different rhyth-mic classes (stress-timed vs. syllable-timed; see, e.g. Pulzován de Egger 2002 for Spanish learners of German and vice versa; Chen 2012 for Taiwanese learners of English), but also in work on the learning of a second or foreign language belong-ing to the same group as the native language of the learners (see, e.g. Benet et al. 2012; Gabriel & Kireva 2014a for Italian learners of Spanish; Ordin, Polyanskaya & Ulbrich 2011 for German learners of English; Gut 2012 for an overview). Rhyth-mic transfer was also shown to occur in the speech of adult bilingual speakers (see, e.g. White & Mattys 2007 for Spanish/English and Spanish/Dutch bilinguals) and in bilingual L1 acquisition (see Kehoe et al. 2011 for Spanish/German chil-dren). As for the field of (usually migration-induced) linguistic contact, rhythmic transfer has been attested for several Asian varieties of English in contact with syllable-timed languages, among them Mandarin Chinese (see, e.g. Low & Grabe 1995; Low et al. 2000; Crystal 1995; Deterding 1994, 2001; Jian 2004; Setter 2003, 2006; Meng et al. 2010) and Hindi (see, e.g. Fuchs 2012; Krivokapić 2013), for banlieue (‘suburban’) Parisian French in contact with migration languages such as Arabic (Fagyal 2010), and for Argentinean Spanish in contact with Italian (Benet et al. 2012; Gabriel & Kireva 2014a). However, studies that explicitly address the acquisition of the speech rhythm of a foreign language by multilingual learners in an instructed learning setting are virtually inexistent, apart from a pilot study by Gabriel et al. (2012) on the acquisition of French speech rhythm by multilingual learners with Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language. The results obtained in this study indicate that learners with a syllable-timed language such as Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language might benefit from the rhythmic properties of their linguistic background regarding the acquisition of the syllable-timed rhythm of French via positive transfer. Our empirical study, which will be presented in the following section in more detail, considerably enlarges the data base in compari-son to the one used in Gabriel et al. (2012), e.g. by including control data from monolingual Chinese learners of French and English, and thus aims at filling a gap in research in this field.

. Empirical study

In what follows, we report on the empirical study carried out with multilingual and monolingual learners of French and English. After introducing our hypoth-eses in Section 4.1, we describe the experimental setting and the data collection



(Section 4.2). In a next step, we present the results obtained from the analyses performed on the data (Section 4.3) and finally discuss them (Section 4.4).

. Hypotheses

Mandarin Chinese considerably differs from the other languages of our sample on all linguistic levels (see Section 2). However, speech rhythm constitutes an excep-tion in this respect since Mandarin Chinese as a syllable-timed language patterns with one of the foreign languages the learners acquire, i.e. French. As suggested by the results of Gabriel et al.’s (2012) pilot study, learners having a syllable-timed language at their disposal might benefit from their (more or less explicit) linguistic knowledge by positively transferring the relevant durational properties of their L1 or heritage language to an also syllable-timed foreign language. The same should apply to learners with stress-timed languages in their linguistic background who acquire another stress-timed variety as a foreign language. In the context of our multilingual classroom setting we thus expect that learners with L1 Mandarin (syllable-timed) are advantaged with respect to the acquisition of French speech rhythm, while monolingual learners with L1 German (stress-timed) should pro-duce the speech rhythm of the foreign language English (stress-timed) in a more target-like way. As for our multilingual learners, who dispose of both a stress-timed and a syllable-timed language, one could plausibly hypothesize that they easily manage to produce the rhythmic properties of both of their foreign lan-guages, by positively transferring the stress-timed rhythm from German to English and the syllable-timed rhythm from Mandarin Chinese to French. Taking into consideration, however, that we are not dealing with a heterogenic group of bal-anced bilinguals, but rather with a subset of individual learners, whose linguistic biographies considerably differ from speaker to speaker, this hypothesis is likely to be only partially supported and thus needs to be specified. Apart from the learners’ multilingual background, we have to account for the fact that Mandarin Chinese and German may have a different status as an L1, an L2, or an early acquired L2, depending on the learner’s linguistic biography. Furthermore, the age of learning of the two foreign languages under consideration varies from speaker to speaker, and some of the participants have learned further foreign languages in addition to English and French (see Section 4.2 for a detailed description of the learners). Diversity also shows up in the learners’ individual attitudes towards the languages of the sample, and also in their individual degree of multilingual and phonologi-cal awareness. Due to these extra-linguistic factors, it is expected that the speech data produced by the multilingual learners exhibit certain inconsistencies that can hardly be explained by referring only to the properties of languages involved, but rather require that the aforementioned extra-linguistic factors be taken into account. Based on these prerequisites, the following hypotheses are made:



(H1) Multilingual learners with a Mandarin Chinese and German language background produce the speech rhythm of the foreign language French more target-like than monolingual German learners because these lack any experience with syllable-timed languages.

(H2) Multilingual learners with a Mandarin Chinese and German language background produce the speech rhythm of the foreign language English more target-like than monolingual Mandarin Chinese learners because these lack any experience with stress-timed languages.

(H3) Possible inconsistencies found in the non-native data produced by the multilingual learners can be traced back to extra-linguistic factors such as atti-tudes as well as multilingual and phonological awareness.

. Methodology

Our set of test persons consists of one experimental group and three control groups. The experimental group comprises 13 multilingual Mandarin Chinese/German speaking students from a German senior high school (Gymnasium). They all started learning English as a foreign language at school before starting French as a second formally instructed foreign language.10 At the time of the recordings the speakers were aged between 14 and 18; they had learned English for 5–11 years and French for 2–6 years. Table 1 gives an overview of the linguistic biography of the informants, thereby clearly revealing the heterogeneity of the group of mul-tilingual learners. Although most of the speakers learned Mandarin Chinese or another Chinese language such as Cantonese, 潮州市话 Cháozhōu huà (a variety belonging to the 闽 Mǐn group), or 上海话 Shànghǎi huà (吴 Wù group, Kurpaska 2010ff),11 and German as an L1 or an early L2, the ages of onset for the languages differ considerably from test person to test person (see Table 1).

. One of our speakers had learned Russian before starting to learn English (see Table 1). With the foreign languages English and French, however, the order of acquisition is the same for all of the learners.

. These varieties have not yet been systematically investigated with respect to speech rhythm (Peggy Mok, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Hongwei Ding, Tongji University of Shanghai, personal communications). However, they do not considerably differ from Man-darin Chinese as concerns syllable structure (Ramsey 1987: 92–93, 109), which suggests that both Cháozhōu and Shànghǎi huà pattern with Mandarin Chinese in terms of speech rhythm. We are grateful to Donghui Zuo (Chinese University of Hong Kong) for providing us with a recording of the North Wind and the Sun in Shànghǎi huà; our analysis of these data showed rhythmic values that only slightly differed from those obtained from the analyses performed on the Mandarin Chinese recordings.



Table 1. Participants in the experimental group

Learner (age, sex)

L1 (< 3 years) L2+ (AoL)

C01 (17, f) MAN GER (9) ENG (10) FRE (11)C02 (14, m) MAN, GER ENG (9) FRE (12)C03 (17, m) MAN GER (6) ENG (9) FRE (12)C06 (17, f) CANT, GER MAN (6) ENG (9) FRE (12)C08 (17, m) GER,

Cháozhōu huà ENG, MAN (11) FRE (13)

C09 (18, m) MAN ENG (10) GER (12) FRE (15)C10 (16, m) CANT, GER ENG, MAN (10) FRE (11)C12 (14, f) MAN, GER ENG (8) FRE (10)C13 (18, m) MAN, GER ENG (10) FRE (13)C14 (15, f) MAN, GER ENG (9) FRE (11) SPA (13)C15 (15, f) Shànghǎi huà,

GER, MANENG (8) FRE (11) SPA (13)

C16 (17, f) MAN RUS (5) ENG (6) GER (9) FRE (11) SPA (13)C17 (16, f) GER MAN (5) ENG (8) FRE (11) SPA (13)

(AoL = age of learning; m = male, f = female; MAN = Mandarin Chinese, GER = German, CANT = Cantonese, ENG = English, FRE = French, SPA = Spanish, RUS = Russian)

The first control group consists of ten monolingual German learners, all of whom are senior high school students (aged 15). At the time of the recordings (Hamburg 2012), they had learned English for seven years and French for four years. The second control group comprises ten monolingual Chinese senior high school students from Beijing who were recorded for Mandarin, English, and French. Their ages range between 17 and 21 years; at the time of the data collection (recordings Beijing 2012), they had learned English for 9–13 years and French for 1–6 years. All learners were recorded in both their first language(s), i.e. German, Mandarin Chinese or German and Mandarin Chinese, respectively, and in the two foreign languages, English and French. The native control data for L1 French were collected from ten students from the University of Bordeaux, all of them native speakers of Standard French (ages 18–22; recordings Bordeaux 2012). For the English speech rhythm, we adopt the values given in Mairano and Romano (2010).

From all speakers we gathered both linguistic and non-linguistic data. As for the collection of the speech data, we used three different types of material which the participants were asked to read aloud. For each language, the materials comprise (1) a reading text, (2) a set of 13 sentences consisting of CV syllables only, and (3) ten nonce words embedded in language-specific carrier dialogues.



Concerning the reading text for English, German, and Mandarin Chinese, we used the fable The North Wind and the Sun and its respective translations, i.e. Nordwind und Sonne and 北风和太阳 Běifēng hé tàiyáng. Due to the high degree of lexical difficulty of the French version of the fable (La bise et le soleil), the infor-mants read a short story from a textbook (Amandine fait du sport).12 All the texts were controlled with respect to syllable structure in order to make sure that the occurrences of different syllable types (CV, CVC, CCVC etc.) contained in the individual texts correspond to what is typical of the relevant language in ordinary speech. The second type of material comprised 13 short sentences for German, French, and Chinese consisting only of consonant vowel sequences (henceforth CV sentences). These were created in order to test speech rhythm when sylla-ble structures are identical, i.e. to detect whether there are rhythmic differences between the languages of our sample that are independent of language-specific constraints on syllable structures. An example for each of the languages is given in (1–3), below.

(1) GER Gero mähte die Wiese. [:e.to.m7.thǝ.di.vi.zǝ] ‘Gero mowed the meadow.’

(2) MAN 哥哥不是理发师。(Gēge bú shì lǐ fà shī.) [kǝ.kǝ.pu. .li.fa. ] ‘The (elder) brother is not a hairdresser.’

(3) FRE Le chat s’est caché sous le lit. [lǝ.ʃa.s7.ka.ʃe.su.lǝ.li] ‘The cat hid under the bed.’

As a third reading task, we invented segmentally identical nonce words which were integrated in language-specific carrier dialogues. These aimed at completely excluding the factor of intrinsic vowel length in the languages (Lehiste 1970), i.e. at neutralizing even more potential effects of the language-specific phenomena. An example for each of the languages is given in (4–6), below.

(4) GER Was hast du gegessen? Ich hab ein Gericht gegessen, das Latimo Bolegamo heißt. ‘What did you eat? I had a dish called Latimo Bolegamo.’

(5) MAN 你吃了什么? Nǐ chī le shén me? 我吃了一道菜。它的名字是 lātīmò bólègámò。 Wǒ chī le yī dào cài. Tā de míngzi shì lātīmò bólègámò. ‘What did you eat? I had a dish called lātīmò bólègámò.’

. As for the English and German versions of the fable, we followed the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association (IPA 1999); the Mandarin Chinese version we used is reproduced in the appendix. The French text is taken from Jouvet (2006: 7) and slightly adapted (see appendix).



(6) FRE Qu’est-ce que tu as mangé ? J’ai mangé un plat qui s’appelle Latimeau Bolégameau. ‘I had a dish called Latimo Bolegamo.’

For English, no CV sentences were considered since plain CV sequences proved to be difficult to find because they would have required several instances of resyl-labification (realization of a word-final consonant as the onset of the following syllable), which most of the learners did not produce correctly, e.g.:

(7) ENG They push a bus in a muddy sea. [ðe‿I.pʊ.ʃǝ.bʌ.sI.nǝ.mʌ.di.si]

The nonce words also were excluded for English because the high rate of diph-thongs in English hardly made it possible to create comparable nonce words. In general, speakers proved to have problems with the expected pronunciation of these words based on their graphic representation allowing for different realiza-tions of the vowels, e.g.:

(8) ENG I had a dish called Lateamo bolegamo. [lǝ.ˈti.mo ‿ʊ.bǝ.lǝ.ˈɡe‿ɪ.mo‿ʊ] or [lǝ.ˈtjɛ.mo‿ʊ.bǝ.ˈlɛ.ɡǝ.mo ‿ʊ] etc.

For the analysis of the speech data, we measured all C and V intervals using Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2011). Following White and Mattys (2007), the boundaries between V and C intervals were determined on the basis of formant structure and pitch period and set at the point of zero crossing of the waveform. Pre-pausal and phrase-final intervals were considered for the analysis since possible effects of final lengthening were likely to be reflected in the measures (Grabe & Low 2002; White & Mattys 2007). According to Grabe and Low (2002), we treated glides as belong-ing to the V intervals if there was no friction attested in the data. For plosives and affricates following a stretch of silence (pause), the beginning was placed at 50ms prior to the burst, given that their boundaries can hardly be determined on the basis of the aforementioned criteria (Mok & Dellwo 2008). Silent pauses and mate-rial affected by any kind of speech disfluency were excluded from the analysis. Based on the segmentation described so far, we calculated %V and VarcoV using the software Correlatore (Mairano & Romano 2010).

As for the non-linguistic data, all learners were asked to fill in a questionnaire in order to obtain data about their linguistic biographies. With the multilingual learners, we additionally conducted semi-structured interviews (Kvale 2007) focus-ing on the learners’ attitudes towards their languages as well as on their individual degree of metalinguistic and phonological awareness. In order to identify personal attitudes towards the languages, one means used in the interview was the assign-ment of languages to body parts in a schematic representation of a human being taken from a language portfolio used in foreign language teaching (Legutke & Lortz 2002). With some of the speakers, we also carried out think-aloud protocols



(Osburne 2003), which aimed at getting information on the perception and the knowledge about production of the two foreign languages. To that end, the learners were first asked to distinguish an L1 from an L2 recording by explaining their deci-sion. Moreover, they read a set of sentences with language-specific phonological phenomena at their best English and French, respectively. After reading, they were asked to reflect on their own pronunciation and the problems they had.

For the analysis of the non-linguistic data, we first created individual learner profiles based on the information taken from both the questionnaires and the interviews. We then extracted further passages from the interviews which reveal the learners’ attitudes towards their languages and their individual degrees of multilingual and phonological awareness. For the analysis of the think-aloud protocols, all instances of comments made by the learners were considered and classified depending on different categories. These categories included segment production, written/spoken distinction, segment clusters, intonation, word stress, sentence stress and information structure, speech rhythm, prosodic processes (e.g. French liaison), and, finally, further prosodic parameters such as speech rate and intensity. The decision for this classification is derived from what the speak-ers said during the session. When one category was mentioned, it was counted for the analysis without taking qualitative differences into account. This means that the think-aloud protocols have so far only been analyzed in a quantitative manner. Finally, we looked for interrelations between the linguistic and the non-linguistic data.

. Results

Figure 1 illustrates the results for the French text. The x-axis indicates the per-centage of vocalic material in the speech signal (%V), while the y-axis shows the values for the variability of V intervals (VarcoV). For clarity’s sake, the L1 values for Mandarin Chinese, French, and German are represented as averages from all speakers’ results. All L1 values correspond to what is reported in previous cross-linguistic studies in speech rhythm (see Ramus, Nespor & Mehler 1999; Grabe & Low 2002; Dellwo 2006; Mairano & Romano 2010): Chinese (right-sided triangle) exhibits a higher value for the percentage of vocalic material (%V: 51.2) and a lower value for the variability of V intervals (VarcoV: 45.3). German (left-sided tri-angle), by contrast, displays a lower value for %V (42.3) and a higher variability of V intervals (VarcoV: 53.6).13 The value for native French (rhombus, target value)

. The mean values for %V and VarcoV of the Mandarin Chinese and German data pro-duced by the multilingual learners (MANMAN/GER, GERMAN/GER) only slightly differ from the values obtained from the analysis performed on the monolingual Chinese and German



is located in between the values for L1 German and L1 Mandarin Chinese with a slightly lower value for %V (46.1) than Chinese and a lower value for VarcoV (45.9) than German. Turning now to the results of the learners, it is conspicuous that the majority of the learners display quite high values for both metrics when they speak French as a foreign language. We further see that the monolingual German learners (light grey squares) represent the group with the highest values for the variability of V intervals, whereas the monolingual Chinese learners (dark grey circles) obtain lower (and more target-like) values in this respect. The val-ues for the multilingual learners (black triangles) are situated in between the two groups of monolingual learners. As for %V, all of the three groups show a roughly comparable range of dispersion, while for the monolingual Chinese the range of VarcoV is slightly reduced as compared to the others. Despite the fact that all of our three speaker groups can generally be distinguished from each other, some

data (MANMAN, GERGER), i.e. %V: 49.7 (MANMAN/GER), 44.6 (GERMAN/GER); VarcoV: 43.9 (MANMAN/GER), 51.1 (GERMAN/GER). The fact that %V is slightly lower for MANMAN/GER than for MANMAN and somewhat higher for GERMAN/GER than for GERGER largely confirms the results obtained in previous studies on bilingual speech rhythm in that the rhythmic values of the two languages tend to converge in the multilingual speakers (see White & Mattys 2007, Gabriel & Kireva 2014b). Inter speaker variability is consistent over the groups considered here, as is shown by the comparable standard deviations in all the data sets (SD for %V MANMAN/

GER: 2.35, GERMAN/GER: 1.56, MANMAN: 2.44, GERGER: 2.95; SD for VarcoV MANMAN/GER: 4.17, GERMAN/GER: 4.15, MANMAN: 5.13, GERGER: 6.61).

GERGER

FREFRE

MANMAN

FREGER

FREMAN/GER

FREMAN

4040

45

50

55 GER L1C16

C17

C01

C15

FRE L1MAN L1

60

70

65

45 50 60%V

Varco V

55

Figure 1. %V and VarcoV for the French read text Amandine fait du sport



individual speakers display more target-like results than others do. To illustrate, we highlight four speakers (C01, C15, C16, C17) as examples for variable success in producing the speech rhythm of the target languages. These four cases will be discussed later on when we look at the non-linguistic data.

Figure 2 illustrates the results for the CV sentences. For L1 French and Mandarin Chinese, the values are comparable to those already obtained from the read texts. For L1 German, in contrast, both VarcoV and %V have changed so that German appears to be comparable to Mandarin Chinese. This result might be explained by the structure of the material which does not include longer con-sonant sequences as usual German speech does. With regard to our learners, the results are roughly comparable to the read text: Again, high values for both rhythm metrics were measured for all learners, but the monolingual Mandarin Chinese group (dark grey circles) displays a lower vocalic variability than the majority of the monolingual Germans (light grey squares) and thus performs more target-like. As far as %V is concerned, the monolingual Germans appear to be located further left in comparison to the other learner groups. For VarcoV, the range of the multilinguals is slightly larger than for the other two groups. The multilinguals’ (black triangles) results once again take an overall intermediate position between the two monolingual control groups, with some speakers performing better than others do.

For the results of the nonce words represented in Figure 3, the general picture is similar to the preceding one in that the German L1 value is situated in between

GERGER

FREFRE

MANMAN

FREGER

FREMAN/GER

FREMAN

4030

40

35

45

50

55

C01

GER L1

MAN L1C17

C15

FRE L1C16

60

65

45 50 60%V

Varco V

55

Figure 2. %V and VarcoV for the French CV sentences



GERGER

FREFRE

MANMAN

FREGER

FREMAN/GER

FREMAN

4025

45

35

55

65

C01

GER L1

MAN L1

C17

C15FRE L1

C16

75

45 50 6560%V

Varco V

55

Figure 3. %V and VarcoV for the French nonce words

Chinese and French. The L1 Mandarin reference this time has increased for %V and decreased for VarcoV; French remains stable. The distribution of the learner groups corresponds to the one found for the read text and for the CV sentences: The Chinese and German monolingual speakers (dark grey circles and light grey squares, respectively) are set apart from each other while the multilingual val-ues (black triangles) range in between them. Some multilingual leaners attain the French target value more successfully than others once more.

In an overall comparison of the three types of material, the values of the mul-tilinguals always appear in between those of the two monolingual groups. More generally, the range of VarcoV constantly increases for all three groups while the range of %V seems to be stable.

The results obtained from the analysis performed on the English data ( Figure 4) show that the value for VarcoV of native English (rhombus, target value) taken from Mairano and Romano (2010) is located far above the value for Chinese (right-sided triangle) and slightly above that of L1 German ( left-sided triangle). With respect to the percentage of vocalic material, English displays lower values than both Chinese and German. Looking at the results for the learn-ers, we first see that the majority of the values for the L1 German learners (light grey squares) lie in between the L1 German starting point and the English target point concerning the variability of V intervals. Most of the monolingual Chinese learners (dark grey circles) display VarcoV values lower than those obtained from the analysis performed on the data produced by the monolingual German learners. This confirms findings from previous studies on speech rhythm in L2



English produced by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (Li & Post 2012). The values for the multilingual learners (black triangles) mix with the results of both monolingual learner groups. As with French, we again highlighted our four individual speakers to demonstrate variation. For these learners, we can see that speaker C01 does not obtain a target-like result for French, especially with respect to VarcoV. Speakers C15 and C16, by contrast, both display very target-like values for French. C17 also shows a positive tendency for the French results, but is not as consistent as C15 and C16. Looking at English, speakers C16 and C17 again perform quite target-like, while C15 is set far apart from the target value for English. C01 is situated in the middle, but has a much stronger tendency towards English than French speech rhythm. In order to explain these inconsis-tencies we considered the different learner profiles and the information regarding attitudes as well as multilingual and phonological awareness obtained from the semi- structured interviews and the think-aloud protocols.

Looking first at the language profiles depicted in Figure 5, we can again remark the heterogeneity that characterizes the group of multilinguals. Learner C01 (female, age: 17) was born in China. She came to Germany at the age of nine. At that time, she did not speak any German and so had to learn it as an L2. She then started learning English at the age of ten and French at the age of eleven. C15 (female, age: 15) also was born in China and learned the Shànghǎi huà variety from birth on. After having moved to Germany, she acquired both German and Mandarin (AoL: 3) since her parents thought Mandarin to be more useful for her.

GERGER

ENGENG (Mairanoand Romano 2010)MANMAN

ENGGER

ENGMAN/GER

ENGMAN

3540

50

45

55

60

65

ENG L1

C16C17

C01 GER L1

C15

MAN L1

70

40 5550%V

Varco V

45

Figure 4. %V and VarcoV for the English read text The North Wind and the Sun



At school, she learned English (AoL: 8), French (AoL: 11), and Spanish (AoL: 13). Learner C16 (female, age: 17) shows a quite rich language profile. She was born in China where she acquired Mandarin Chinese as a native language, and thus might have a quite strong Mandarin language background, like C01 and C15. At the age of five, her family moved to Russia where she started learning Russian as the first stress-timed language she got in contact with; until present, she sporadically prac-tices Russian with her father. One year after having moved to Russia, she started English lessons at school (AoL: 6). At the age of nine, she moved to Germany with her family and she started to learn German as an L3. She continued learning Eng-lish at school and started French at the age of eleven; Spanish as a supplementary foreign language was added to her linguistic background two years later (AoL: 13). C17 (female, age: 16), in contrast to the other informants, was born in Germany. She learned Mandarin from five years on. At school, she learned English (AoL: 8), French (AoL: 11), and Spanish (AoL: 13). Apart from speaker C01, all speakers practice their Mandarin Chinese skills by regularly attending 星期日学校 xīngqīrì xuéxiào ‘(Chinese) Sunday school’.

Taking into consideration these profiles, it is rather unexpected that the learner C01 shows target-like results for English because she seems to have the strongest Mandarin Chinese background in that she grew up as a Mandarin Chinese mono-lingual until the age of nine and started learning her first stress-timed language (German) relatively late as compared to the other three speakers. So it does not seem that she has the best prerequisites for (positively) transferring stress-timed characteristics from her linguistic background to the foreign language English. As for the learners C15 and C16, both of them have a comparable language back-ground in that they speak three syllable-timed languages and have a Chinese vari-ety as their L1 (Shànghǎi huà or Mandarin). It might seem more expectable that they produce more target-like values in French than in English but this only holds true for C15. One can suspect that for C16, her early L2 Russian may have stabi-lized a stress-timed language background. Finally, C17 is the only speaker who learned German as an L1 and Mandarin Chinese as an early L2, so one could expect her to be more successful in English than in French speech rhythm. How-ever, she consistently performs neither very target-like nor absolutely non- target-like. Comparing the interviews of our four speakers clarifies the challenging results presented so far.

C01: Ich glaub, da ich jetzt in Deutschland lebe, ist natürlich sinnvoller, wenn ich gut Deutsch kann … [Chinesisch] hat jetzt gar keinen richtigen Einfluss darauf, wie ich jetzt (.) Englisch oder Französisch lerne.“I think, because I live in Germany now, that it is more useful for me to speak German well … [Chinese] doesn’t have any influence on how I learn English or French.”



0 3 6 9 12 15 18

Language pro�le C01

Mandarin Chinese (China, Germany)

German (Germany)

English

French

0 3 6 9 12 15 18


Mandarin Chinese (China, Russia, Germany)

Russ. (RU)

English (Russia, Germany)

German (Germany)

French

Spanish

0 3 6 9 12 15 18


Mandarin Chinese / German (Germany)

Shànghǎi huà (China)

English

French

Spanish

0 3 6 9 12 15 18


German (Germany)

Mandarin Chinese (Germany)

English

French

Spanish

Figure 5. Learner profiles for the speakers C01, C15, C16, and C17



Interviewer: […] Welche Sprachen sind für dich nahe zusammen und welche Sprachen sind also entfernter?C01: [Frage missverstanden] Also, ich glaube (.) auf jeden Fall Deutsch und danach kommt dann glaub ich Chinesisch, weil das sozusagen mit meiner Familie sozusagen verbunden ist und dann Englisch und dann als letzter vielleicht noch andere Sprachen, wie z.B. Französisch.“Interviewer: Which languages do you feel to be closer together and which are further apart?C01: [misunderstood question] Well, I think definitely German, and then I think Chinese, because that’s somehow connected to my family, and then English, and lastly probably other languages like French, for example.”

As the interview shows, C01 does not consider Chinese to be influential on how she learns foreign languages compared to the influence of the surrounding lan-guage German. Although Mandarin is her L1, she considers German to be much more important. Furthermore, the questionnaire reveals that she never attended Chinese Sunday school. It is striking that she quit French courses as soon as pos-sible and that it has the lowest priority for her. There is no clear evidence of pho-nological or multilingual awareness.

C15: [Zuordnung der Sprachen zu Körperteilen (Legutke & Lortz 2002)] Also einfach Chinesisch und Deutsch so im Herz und auch wenn ich was denke ist halt auch auf Chinesisch und Deutsch. Ins Gehirn wollt ich jetzt eher die Fremdsprachen setzen.“[assigning languages to parts of body] Chinese and German to the heart; even when I think it is in Chinese and German. I was going to put the foreign languages in the brain.”

C15: Manche Sprachen klingen so gesanglicher, z. B. Italienisch, manche bisschen abgehackt … Ich glaub, dass es da eine Verbindung gibt zu Musik.“Some languages sound like singing, like Italian, others more choppy … I think there is a link to music.”

Learner C15 shows in the interview that she seems to be emotionally attached to both her L1 Chinese14 and the surrounding language German, whereas her foreign languages seem to only serve functional purposes. She also displays some proof of phonological and multilingual awareness, for example, by comparing two different groups of languages with respect to their melodic properties, which might even refer to what we understand by speech rhythm (klingen so gesanglicher ‘sound like singing’ vs. abgehackt ‘choppy’).

. Note that she does not make any distinction between her mother tongue Shànghǎi huà and Mandarin Chinese when she comments on her heritage language.



C16: Viele können diese Töne nicht so gut und manche Aussprachen nicht so gut, weil die Zunge, also mir ist aufgefallen, bei Sprache ist Zunge ganz wichtig.“Many people do not produce the tones and some pronunciations very well because of the tongue. I noticed that the tongue is very important for languages.”

C16: Also wenn ich eine Sprache wie Französisch spreche und da Wörter kommen, die auf anderen Sprachen es auch gibt, denke ich sofort daran, wie man das auf Deutsch, auf Englisch, auf Russisch, auf Spanisch aussprechen könnte. Das heißt, die folgen gleich darauf mit dran und alle verbunden, ja.“When I speak a language like French, and there are words which also exist in other languages, I immediately think of how they are pronounced in German, in English, in Russian, in Spanish; that is, they directly follow each other and are all interrelated.”

Learner C16 does not show any particular affection to a special language, but seems to be interested in any of the languages she has at her disposal. In compari-son with the other informants, her commentary on the importance of the tongue for the production of speech sounds reveals a high degree of phonological aware-ness, in particular concerning articulatory phonetics. Furthermore, she refers to prosodic characteristics such as the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese that might pose problems to L2 learners. As for her own strategies of foreign language learn-ing, she refers to cross-linguistic interrelations on the lexical level, thus showing a certain degree of multilingual awareness.

C17: Manche sagen ja, dass Deutsch so eine abgehackte Sprache ist. Und dass es nicht so eine Melodie hat zum Beispiel wie das Französische … Also wenn man sagt, dass Deutsch nicht so eine Melodie hat, dann kann man auch sagen, dass dann die Deutschen, die Chinesisch lernen, nicht diese Melodie hinbekommen.“Some people say that German is a choppy language. And that it is not as melodic as French. And if one says that German doesn’t have such a melody, you can also assume that Germans who learn Chinese don’t succeed in getting this melody.”

C17: Wörter klingen oft gleich. Also die haben oft nen gleichen Stamm. Weil sie alle glaube ich vom Lateinischen irgendwie kommen. Und ähm ja zum Beispiel so was wie Stern und star und estrella und étoile und so, ist ja relativ gleich. Und ähm ja also es ist schon leichter, sich das zu merken, wenn es gleich klingt, aber ich schaffe es dann trotzdem eigentlich, das zu trennen. Also auch zum Beispiel, wenn es mir auf Spanisch nicht einfällt, dann weiß ich ‘Okay, es heißt étoile auf Französisch. Das war doch auch so was in der Art.’ Und dann weiß ich es dann irgendwie doch wieder.“Words often sound alike. Well, they often have the same stem. Because I think they all derive from Latin in a way. For example words like Stern and star and estrella and étoile and so on are relatively similar. And, well, it is easier to remember them when they sound alike but I still manage to separate them. Also, for example, when I can’t think of it in Spanish, I know ‘Okay, it’s étoile in French. It was something similar, right?’ And then I somehow remember it again.”



Finally, the interview with learner C17 does not show evidence that she prioritizes any particular language over another. She exhibits a certain degree of phonologi-cal and multilingual awareness by comparing the intonational differences between her languages and by reflecting on the consequences they may have for learners. As for metalinguistic awareness, she describes how her languages are interrelated to each other on the lexical level and how this helps her learn vocabulary.

The results of the think-aloud protocols are in accordance with the findings relating to phonological awareness in the interviews. With their comments, the speakers were able to confirm this in the protocols although the individual results vary (see Table 2): C15 and C17 make comments on five categories. While C15 mentions all categories in both languages, C17 does so only for two criteria. C16 evokes all the categories, mostly in both English and French.

Table 2. Results of the think-aloud protocols for speakers C15, C16, and C17

C15 C16 C17

Segment production ENG, FRE ENG, FRE ENG, FREWritten/spoken distinction ENG, FRESegment clusters FRE ENGIntonation ENG, FRE ENG, FRE ENG, FREWord stress ENG, FRE ENGSentence stress/information structure ENG, FRERhythm FREProsodic processes ENG, FRE FRE FREFurther prosodic parameters ENG, FRE ENG, FRE ENG

(ENG refers to comments on English; FRE refers to comments on French)

. Discussion

The results obtained from the analysis of the French speech data reveal quite high values for both %V and VarcoV in all the learner data. We interpret this finding as an effect of low proficiency which leads to variable (and usually lower) speech rate and higher occurrences of hesitation phenomena. The L1 Mandarin Chinese speakers generally produce French rhythm more target-like than the monolingual German learners do. The group of the multilingual speakers displays inconsistent results in mixing up with both monolingual groups.

As far as English is concerned, the situation is inverted as compared to that of French for the monolingual learner groups. The speech rhythm is produced more target-like by the monolingual German than by the monolingual Mandarin Chinese learners. The data produced by the multilinguals, again, exhibit some



inconsistencies, in that some of them perform like the German monolinguals, while others rather pattern with the monolingual Mandarin Chinese learners. Turning back to our hypotheses (see Section 4.1), we can conclude that both H1 and H2 are only partially confirmed, in that for both foreign languages not all of the multilingual learners perform better than the informants belonging to the monolingual control groups.

As shown by means of some extracts from semi-focused interviews and the results of the think-aloud protocols, the non-linguistic data reveal that the learners’ phonological and multilingual awareness as well as their attitudes towards their languages seem to have an influence on the production of speech rhythm in the two foreign languages: Learner C01 has a positive attitude towards German. She does not show a lot of phonological awareness; her preference of stress-timed German possibly leads to a more successful production of speech rhythm in English than in French. Learner C15 feels linked to both Chinese and German and also displays some degree of phonological awareness. The fact that a Chinese variety (Shànghǎi huà) is her L1 might support her target-like production in French. Learner C16 appears to appreciate languages and their usefulness in general, and she shows a comparably high degree of multilingual and phonological awareness. Interestingly enough, her production of speech rhythm is quite target-like for both English and French. This indicates that a positive attitude towards Chinese might favor posi-tive transfer of the syllable-timed speech rhythm of the heritage language to the foreign language French, while she relies on German for the production of the stress-timed patterns in English. Finally, learner C17 does not seem to favor any particular language and shows a fairly high degree of phonological and multi-lingual awareness. The tendency towards successful speech rhythm production in both languages patterns nicely with these non-linguistic factors. Seen on the whole, the inconsistent picture of the results obtained from the rhythmic analyses performed on the speech data becomes much clearer as soon as extra-linguistic aspects are taken into account. With regard to our hypotheses (see Section 4.1), we can thus conclude that H3 is confirmed.15

. These findings are corroborated by sociolinguistic analyses. In Labov’s (2014) study, the African American variety spoken in Philadelphia is compared to the white mainstream variety, assuming that phonological approximation is the general trend. This also holds for the realization of vocalic segments by African American speakers. Interestingly, the results of speakers who show a less trend-like behavior can be explained by taking into account factors such as “the amount of social communication across racial lines” (Labov 2014: 16) and the general outlook on integration. The more positive their individual attitudes on these topics are, the more their phonology adapts to the system of white Philadelphian speakers (Labov 2014: 13f.). Extra-linguistic factors thus may influence speakers’ segmental phonology as well as their prosody in quite diverse multilingual contexts.



All things considered, the striking interplay between more or less target-like foreign language production and extra-linguistic factors at least partly explain the challenging multilingual learner data: Both the learners’ attitudes towards the languages of the sample (foreign languages, German, and the heri-tage language, Mandarin Chinese) and a high degree of multilingual as well as phonological awareness seem to favor positive transfer of timing patterns from a previously acquired language to a foreign language exhibiting the same rhyth-mic properties.

. Concluding remarks

Based on the analyses performed on non-native English and French data pro-duced by different groups of multilingual and monolingual learners, we have shown that both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors constrain cross-linguistic influence with respect to timing patterns. As a function of the complex inter-play between prosodic similarities and differences on the one hand and language attitudes as well as meta-linguistic and phonological awareness on the other, the multilingual learners with Mandarin Chinese as a heritage language can have an advantage over the German monolinguals in learning French and over the Chinese monolinguals in learning English, given that the rhythmic properties of their background languages can be positively transferred to the foreign languages. The interrelations between the extra-linguistic data taken from the questionnaire, the semi-focused interviews, and the think-aloud protocols and the (more or less target-like) production of speech rhythm in the foreign languages suggest that positive transfer is favored by the learners’ language attitudes as well as by their individual degree of multilingual and phonological awareness. This shows that a typologically distant language as part of a complex language background does not constitute a disadvantage for foreign language learning. Quite the reverse, hav-ing syllable-timed Mandarin Chinese as a heritage along with the (stress-timed) German language in their linguistic repertoire rather is an advantage – provided that the relevant properties of their background languages get ‘activated’ in order to serve as a basis for positive transfer of timing patterns. We interpret our find-ings as evidence to suggest that multilingual and phonological awareness should be promoted in scholar education, with regards to both the learners and the teach-ers. Bearing in mind the rhythmic parallels between learner and contact vari-eties, as briefly referred to in Section 3, the reality of present-day multilingual classrooms offers a beneficial opportunity to teach prosodic differences of differ-ent languages, including contact varieties of French and English, and to practice



metalinguistic and phonological awareness, especially because of the fact that cer-tain properties linked to speech rhythm such as, e.g. syllable duration, qualify as being “highly learnable and teachable” (Setter 2006: 767). In the end, the results of our study speak in favor of an intensified collaboration between linguistics and language pedagogy in order to better meet the challenges posed by the complex constellations of linguistic and cultural diversity that are daily fare in contempo-rary multilingual classrooms.

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Appendix: Materials recorded

Mandarin Chinese: Fable The North Wind and the Sun

北风与太阳有一次，北风和太阳正在争论谁比较有本事。他们正好看到有个人走过，那个人穿着一件斗篷。他们就说了，谁可以让那个人脱掉那件斗篷，就算谁比较有本事。于是，北风就拼命地吹。怎知，他吹得越厉害，那个人就越是用斗篷包紧自己。最后，北风没办法，只好放弃。接着，太阳出来晒了一下，那个人就立刻把斗篷脱掉了。于是，北风只好认输啦。

Běi fēng hé tàiyángYǒu yí cì, běi fēng hé tàiyáng zhèng zài zhēng lùn shuí bǐ jiào yǒu běn shì. Tāmen zhèng hǎo kàn dào yǒu gè rén zǒu guò, nà gè rén chuān zhe yī jiàn dǒu péng. Tāmen jiù shuō le, shuí kě yǐ ràng nà gè rèn tuō diào nà jiàn dǒu péng, jiù suàn shuí bǐ jiào yǒu běn shì. Yú shì, běi fēng jiù pīn mìng de chuī. Zěn zhī, tā chuī de yuè lì hài, nà gè rén jiù yuè shì yòng dǒu péng bāo jǐn zì jǐ. Zuì hòu, běi fēng méi bàn fǎ, zhǐ hǎo fàng qì. Jiē zhe, tài yáng chū lái shài le yī xià, nà gè rén jiù lì kè bǎ dǒu péng tuō diào le. Yú shì, běi fēng zhǐ hǎo rèn shū la.

French: Short story from textbook (Jouvet 2006: 7, slightly adapted)

Amandine fait du sport

Les chats n’aiment pas faire du sport, mais le chat des Carbonne aime ça. Le chat s’appelle Aman-dine. Elle fait souvent du sport le dimanche soir. Elle ne fait pas de la natation parce que les chats n’aiment pas l’eau. Elle ne fait pas du foot avec Alain, et elle ne fait pas du jogging avec Olivier. Mais elle fait du sport le dimanche soir. La famille Carbonne est devant la télé le diman-che soir, et ils ne jouent pas avec Amandine. Elle n’aime pas ça ! Alors elle grimpe sur la télé. Alors maman va à la cuisine et Amandine va aussi à la cuisine. Après, Amandine grimpe sur les genoux de papa et de maman, puis elle grimpe encore sur la télé, puis sur les étagères et sur la table. Et comme ça, Amandine fait du sport le dimanche soir.

Assessing foreign language speech rhythm in multilingual learners

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