Qualifying multilingualism: Connecting language background with speech production outcomes in Russian–English and Italian–German children

Abstract

Multilingualism exists on a wide spectrum, and assessing an individual’s linguistic background and predicting language outcomes is challenging. To evaluate the predictive value of more precise language background questionnaires (LBQs) (e.g., Byers-Heinlein et al., 2020) we investigate acoustic-phonetic outcomes in young simultaneous bilinguals and link these to their backgrounds assessed through our detailed LBQ (cf. Rinker et al., 2017). We analyze elicited productions of (study 1) Russian vowels /i/ and /ɨ/ by 8- to 13-year-old Russian–English bilinguals, and (study 2) productions of voicing by 3- to 6-year-old German–Italian bilinguals. Both studies show differences in the realization of acoustic-phonetic cues of bilingual versus monolingual children. This may be indicative of motoric complexity involved in producing the formant-frequency height/movement of Russian /i/ or prevoicing; and/or can be interpreted as crosslinguistic sound-category interference from the majority/societal language (English; German) to the minority/heritage-language (Russian; Italian). Importantly, we find effects even in simultaneous bilinguals with daily heritage-language use and at least one native heritage-language parent. We argue that precise assessment of bilinguals’ ongoing language use can serve as a predictor for acoustic-phonetic outcomes, and will discuss possibilities for further modernization and standardization of LBQs, specifically in terms of (multi)media use, motivation, and clinical settings.