Research shows that sojourning L2 learners are often eager to speak with their native-speaker peers, but they may not realize how these interactions differ from their experiences in the L2 classroom. Using the Communication Accommodation Theory (Giles & Ogay, 2007) as a guiding principle, this mixed-method study aims to, at two different time…

Purpose: One of the central questions in speech production research is to what degree certain structures have an inherent difficulty and to what degree repeated encounter and practice make them easier to process. The goal of this article was to determine the extent to which frequency and sonority distance of consonant clusters predict production…

Bringing to the field of third language (L3) research a new population of speakers, namely heritage speaker (HS) L3 learners, this study investigates the accents of 19 German-Italian HSs in L3 English. In an accent rating experiment, the speech samples of the HSs and three control groups (monolingual speakers of English, Italian, and German) were…

A multilingual experience can be considered a significant asset. However, since the earliest studies in the field, research has reported mixed results regarding potential advantages such as increased cognitive ability and metalinguistic awareness. Moreover, studies investigating the influence of bilingualism/multilingualism on the acquisition of…

The lexical representation of compound words in speech production is still under debate. While most studies with healthy adult speakers suggest that a single lemma representation is active during compound production, data from neuropsychological studies point toward multiple representations, with activation of the compound's constituent lemmas in…

This paper reports findings from an exploratory study on multilingual speakers conducted in Germany. Data were collected using a questionnaire instrument launched in 2021. To our knowledge, this is the first enquiry into multilinguals' own perception of their spoken languages in Germany. The core research questions addressed in this paper are (1)…

In this chapter, we address the process of German language acquisition of adult refugees within the formal setting of the integration course, in order to identify factors contributing to both the likelihood of attending a course and successfully completing it. We used a mixed-method approach, analysing the dataset of the IAB-BAMF-SOEP refugee…

We analyze whether non-native speakers in the classroom affect students' educational achievement and social integration. In contrast to previous studies, which mainly examine the effect of the share of immigrant pupils, we focus on language heterogeneity by using a novel measure of the degree of linguistic diversity in the classroom. Conditional…

Background: In Germany, three large-scale surveys--the Level One Study (LEO), the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), and the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS)--provide complementary data on adults' literacy skills that can be harnessed to study adults with low literacy. To ensure that research on…

We often use pronouns like it or they without explicitly mentioned antecedents. We asked whether the human processing system that resolves such indirect pronouns uses the immediate visual-sensory context in multimodal discourse. Our results showed that people had no difficulty understanding conceptually central referents, whether explicitly…

This paper describes and discusses findings from an explorative study on multilingualism among university staff. In a project conducted in the University of Hamburg, 661 members of staff in administrative and technical roles have participated in a survey on their multilingual repertoires, on the usage of different languages as well as multilingual…

In this paper the results of an online survey (n=210) regarding the usefulness of Facebook for informal L2 learning will be presented. Participants were individual Facebook users who study either German (n=118) or Japanese (n=92). By using a combination of open and closed questions, the mostly quantitative findings of the survey indicate that for…

Non-native speakers' sensitivity to discourse-level cues in pronoun interpretation has not been widely researched. We carried out three antecedent-choice questionnaire experiments which investigate the impact of focus on within-sentence pronoun resolution in native and non-native speakers of German and native speakers of Russian. Focus was…

This study examines the attitudes of German-speaking pupils towards Sorbian-language education and the problems these pupils indicate as an obstacle to becoming bilingual through educational settings. Based on the research carried out in the Upper Sorbian Grammar School in Bautzen/Budyšin (Germany) combining a statistical survey, in-depth…

The speech of second language learners is often influenced by phonetic patterns of their first language. This can make them difficult to understand, but sometimes for listeners of the same first language to a lesser extent than for native listeners. The present study investigates listeners' awareness of the accent by asking whether accented speech…