How Bilingual Experience Shapes Accents in German-Italian Primary School Children

Abstract

This study investigates the accents of German-Italian school children (6–10 years old) in their two languages. We ask whether accents in the bilingual children’s two languages are related and how foreign accentedness is associated with proficiency in other areas of language (speech rate, vocabulary size) and extralinguistic factors (formal and informal exposure and AoO in the majority language). Data from 87 early bilingual German-Italian children is judged by adult raters in Italy and Germany. Bilinguals are perceived as being more accented than monolinguals, mostly in Italian, the HL of the bilingual children. Moreover, children with a more monolingual-like accent in Italian tend to sound foreign in German, and vice versa, but some children have no perceivable accent in any language. Accentedness is especially affected by amount of language use, which underlines the importance of exposure to the minority language at this age, regardless of the setting, formal or informal.