CLIVaG
CLIVaG: Cross-Linguistic Influence in Vowels and Geminates: Acoustic, perceptual and ERP study on L1 of late Salento Italian-French bilinguals
Nowadays, many people move abroad and live in a country where the local language is not their mother tongue (L1). As a result, many use a foreign language (L2) on a daily basis. Those who started learning an L2 after the age of six may be considered late bilinguals. Research on how the learners’ L1 affects L2 acquisition has become a major topic in recent decades. In the field of phonetics, it has mainly focused on how the learners’ L1 affects the pronunciation of their L2. However, relatively little is known about how the L2 of late bilinguals influences their L1 at the phonetic level. The CLIVaG project is the first study to deal with the influence of the L2 (French) on the L1 (Italian) of Italians from Salento living in Paris, i.e., late Salento Italian-French bilinguals (hereafter SIF). It investigates L1 production, perception and processing by SIF together with L1 production, perception and processing by Italians living in Salento and L1 production of the French living in Paris as controls, using three methodological approaches, namely acoustic measurements, perception and ERP experiments. Such a combination of methodological approaches is highly innovative compared to the methodologies used in previous studies on the phonetic influence of L2 on L1. Given the phonetic differences between Parisian French and Italian spoken in Salento, CLIVaG focuses on L1 vowels and geminate consonants of SIF. The CLIVaG results will be of interest to researchers studying the phonetic influence of L2 on L1, phoneticians, phonologists, psycholinguists and sociolinguists, as well as to SIF (thousands of SIF live in Paris), their families and friends, immigrants in general, teachers, educational policy makers and speech therapists. In addition, CLIVaG is in line with the research orientations of Horizon Europe, supporting studies of linguistic transformations of society and a better understanding of the linguistic impact of drivers of change (mobility and migration) on society.
