How cross–linguistic influence affects the use of duration in the production and perception of corrective and non–corrective focus types

Abstract

Speakers use corrective focus as an explicit way to correct misunderstandings in communication. We investigate whether immersive contact with a rhythmically different language affects the production and perception of duration as a cue to corrective and non–corrective focus. We tested twenty-eight native speakers and sixty-four native listeners of Urdu, half of whom lived in Germany and used German as a second language, and half lived in Pakistan. German is a stress–timed language with head–prominence marking and makes intensive use of duration to mark corrective focus, while Urdu is a syllable–timed language with edge–prominence marking, which uses duration differently from German to mark focus types. Results showed that the majority language, German, affected focus processing in Urdu differently across modalities: In production, focus marking was not affected by country of residence, while in perception, Urdu speakers living in Germany were more sensitive to duration in the corrective focus context than Urdu speakers in Pakistan. We analyze this as cross–linguistic influence and argue that contact with a stress–timed, head–prominence majority language (here: German) affects the cue weighting in the native language Urdu in perception but not (yet) in production.