Bancu, Ariana

Olariu, Ligia

English

NEIU Digital Commons (Northeastern Illinois University)

Northeastern Illinois University NEIU Digital Commons NEIU Student Research and Creative Activities Symposium 2021 NEIU Student Research and Creative Activities Symposium Apr 22nd, 10:00 AM Language Dominance in Trilingual Speakers Ariana Bancu Northeastern Illinois University Ligia Olariu Northeastern Illinois University Follow this and additional works at: https://neiudc.neiu.edu/srcas Bancu, Ariana and Olariu, Ligia, "Language Dominance in Trilingual Speakers" (2021). NEIU Student Research and Creative Activities Symposium. 2. https://neiudc.neiu.edu/srcas/2021/s39/2 This Event is brought to you for free and open access by the Conferences and Symposia at NEIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in NEIU Student Research and Creative Activities Symposium by an authorized administrator of NEIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact h-owen3@neiu.edu,l-wallis@neiu.edu. LANGUAGE DOMINANCE IN TRILINGUAL SPEAKERS Ariana Bancu and Ligia Olariu Department of Linguistics, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, IL 60625  The current study is conducted by Dr. Ariana Bancu, faculty member and principal investigator (PI), and Ligia Olariu, MA student of Linguistics and research assistant (RA). The purpose of the study is to analyze the relationship between language contact and language variation among a group of Transylvanian Saxon (TrSax) speakers. TrSax is a Germanic language that developed in Romania over 800+ years and was transmitted orally over the centuries. The participants, one group in Romania and one  in Germany, are multilingual, speaking Romanian, TrSax, and German to varying degrees. Participants in Romania are Romanian-dominant, while participants in Germany are German-dominant. We examine the relationship between the languages of these multilingual speakers and how the dominant language of a participant influences their less dominant languages. To establish this, we analyzed aspiration of syllable-initial stop consonants /p, t, k/ in the Romanian spoken by these participants. We focused on this feature because in Germanic languages syllable-initial stops /p, t. k/ are aspirated, while in Romance languages, such as Romanian, they are not. We expect to find that TrSax and German will exhibit a cross over into Romanian when Romanian is the least dominant language of a participant. Aspiration can be explained by a phenomenon known as ‘voice onset time’ (VOT). While all stops have VOT, for aspirated stops that time is longer and for unaspirated stops that time is shorter. Thus far, we observed that, when speaking in Romanian, participants exhibit /p, t, k/ aspiration in syllable-initial positions. To quantify our results, we followed a two-stage process. First, the RA transcribed naturalistic speech data collected by the PI in Romanian using ELAN, a specialized transcription and annotation software commonly used in linguistic research. Then the RA isolated 30 tokens per phoneme, per participant — a total of approximately 90 tokens per participant. In the following step we will use the software Praat to measure VOT and establish if VOT for these target consonants are significantly longer for German-dominant participants versus Romanian-dominant participants . The findings of this study will lend better understanding regarding the degree of influence dominant languages have on subordinate languages.  

Language Dominance in Trilingual Speakers

https://neiudc.neiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1390&context=srcas

Language Dominance in Trilingual Speakers

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