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Category: Project

Description: Acquiring prosodic focus marking in a second language (L2) is difficult for learners whose native language utilizes strategies that differ from those of the target language. German typically uses pitch accents (L+H*/H*) to mark focus, while Arabic preferably employs a syntactic strategy (word order) or lexical means. In Syrian Arabic, a primarily spoken variety, pitch accents are used to mark focus, but the distribution and types are different to German. The present study in-vestigates how Syrian Arabic learners of German prosodically mark focus in L2 German sub-ject-verb-object (SVO) sentences. A question-answer paradigm was used to elicit German SVO-sentences with broad, narrow, or contrastive focus. Productions of advanced (C1, N=17) and intermediate (B1/B2, N=8) Syrian Arabic learners were compared to those of German con-trols (N=12). Like the controls, both learner groups successfully placed pitch accents on focused constituents. However, learners, especially those with lower proficiency, used more pitch accents in non-focal regions than the controls, revealing challenges in de-accentuation. These may result from the larger number of phrase boundaries in learners' productions, which in turn might be ex-plained by transfer from the L1 or aspects of general fluency. Learners also differed from the con-trols with respect to accent type. They predominantly used H* for narrow or contrastive focus (instead of L+H*); proficiency effects played only a minor role here. Our study hence reveals an intricate interplay between cross-linguistic influence and proficiency in the L2-acquisition of pro-sodic focus marking, targeting a language pair so far underrepresented in the literature (German vs. Syrian Arabic).