Cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of phonology and phonetics by multilingual children and adults

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Multilingualism is becoming the norm for European citizens due to the educational policies that introduce two foreign languages at school on a mass scale, due to increasing opportunities in foreign exchange programme as well as a growing job-related mobility. Although the investigation of the mutual influence of the different languages that a multilingual speaker knows has been one of the main research objectives in language acquisition studies, the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) is still far from being well understood. Especially the exploration of the factors influencing the frequency, direction and form of CLI is still in its infancy. This project investigates phonological and phonetic cross-linguistic influence in 20 multilingual speakers, both children and adults, with the language combination of German, English, French/Latin and Polish. The study uses a 10-month longitudinal design with four data collection points at which language production and perception will be tested for each participant. This will be augmented by a 14-week period of dense data collection for two adult participants. In particular, the intricate relationship between phonological and phonetic CLI in multilinguals and its conditioning factors such as age/age of acquisition, proficiency in second language (L2) and third language (L3), language distance/perceived language distance, metalinguistic awareness, recency of use and L2 status will be examined. Also, the dynamic relationship between the factors themselves will be investigated and a hierarchy of factors triggering phonological CLI will be established. This project will thus carry out, in the framework of Dynamic Systems Theory, the first large-scale longitudinal study to obtain authentic developmental data on the acquisition of Polish as an L3, which is crucial for the understanding and theoretical modelling of the acquisition processes during language learning in a typical classroom environment.