Abstract

RATO, Anabela; FLORES, Cristina; NEVES, Daniela  and  OLIVEIRA, Diana. The phonological competence of Portuguese-German bilingual speakers: a study on global accent, comprehensibility and inteligibility in their heritage language. Diacrítica [online]. 2015, vol.29, n.1, pp.297-326. ISSN 0807-8967.

In the field of ​​L2 perception and production, age of acquisition and amount and quality of exposure to the target language are crucial factors in the development of a global (near) native-like accent. This study evaluates the effect of these two factors on the phonetic competence of heritage speakers of European Portuguese (EP). The oral productions of twelve speakers of EP as a heritage language, who live in Germany, six EP monolingual speakers and six native speakers of German, who are proficient users of EP as a L2, were evaluated in terms of native/non-native accent, comprehensibility and intelligibility of speech. Regarding their accent, the results show that bilingual speakers were globally perceived as native speakers of EP, which seems to indicate that early exposure to a language is a strong predictor of global native accent development. The assessment of comprehensibility also yielded similar results for bilingual and monolingual speakers.

Keywords : global accent; comprehensibility; inteligibility; heritage language.

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