Intonation of polar questions in German-dominant heritage speakers of Italian

Abstract

In heritage language (HL) research, prosodic aspects of heritage speakers (HSs) speech have only recently started to receive attention and the results have been mixed. While some studies report cross-linguistic influence (CLI) for HL intonation, others consider it robust. The present study contributes to this debate and examines the intonational patterns of polar questions (PolQs) in the two languages of 30 HSs of Italian with German as majority language. This language combination displays overlapping and distinct intonational patterns in PolQs, making intonation potentially subject to CLI in bilingual language acquisition. The results of an elicited production task indicate that HSs maintain a systemic difference between their two languages. In German, HSs produce PolQs in a monolingual like manner. In Italian of HSs, both monolingual-like performance and CLI from German has been observed. Early Italian use is beneficial for monolingual-like outcomes in the HL.