November 3, 2023
Annie Helms, PhD Candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures (RLL) - Linguistics Track, will defend her dissertation entiltled: "Trilingual production and perception of lexical stress: Extending the cue-weighting transfer hypothesis to L3 acquisition" on Thursday, November 16, 2023, 4 - 5:30 PM at the S&P Library, 5125 Dwinelle Hall Level E.
Helms' Dissertation Committee: Justin Davidson (Spanish and Portuguese) [chair], Keith Johnson (Linguistics), Isaac Bleaman (Linguistics), Mark Amengual (Languages and Applied Linguistics [UC Santa Cruz])
This dissertation analyzes the production and perception of lexical stress in trilinguals’ first, second, and third languages to evaluate how the cue-weighting transfer hypothesis (e.g., Chrabaszcz et al., 2014; Tremblay et al., 2021) applies to L3 acquisition. Acoustic correlates of lexical stress were analyzed in English, Spanish, and Catalan, as produced and perceived by trilingual speakers, and PCA was used to extend the Bilingual Language Profile (Birdsong et al., 2012) to obtain relative language dominance scores for the trilinguals. Given the differences in segmental and suprasegmental cue-weightings to stress in each of these languages, trilinguals' perception and production of lexical stress in each language provides insight to the way segmental and suprasegmental cues are transferred crosslinguistically.
The results of the production and perception tasks indicate that relative language dominance does affect cue-weighting to a different extent in each language. There was also evidence for regressive transfer of cue-weighting in both production and perception, indicating that all languages in a trilingual’s repertoire are susceptible to crosslinguistic influence. Through a comparison of theoretical frameworks of L3 phonetics and phonology, the Attrition & Drift in Access, Production, and Perception Theory (ADAPPT; de Leeuw & Chang, in press) was determined to most closely align with the findings of this study.