Tanja Kupisch
Biographic Data
| ID | 178855 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tanja Kupisch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tanja |
| FAMILY NAME | Kupisch |
| SIGNATURE | KUPISCH T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Konstanz |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2653-2692 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
How Language Policies Can Foster Linguistic Inequality and Conflict
Ethiopia is a multiethnic country with more than 80 languages. Its cultural and linguistic diversity has been a source of challenges and tensions, which have often manifested in conflicts between ethnic groups and the government, as well as resentment between ethnolinguistic groups, and have periodically escalated into violent conflicts. In this paper, we provide overviews of the languages, historical eras, and associated language policies in Eth…
Production and comprehension of rhetorical questions in the acquisition of Italian as a first language
This paper investigates rhetorical questions (RhQs) in monolingual children acquiring Italian, comparing the comprehension and production of RhQs based on their optional lexical, morphosyntactic, and prosodic cues. We show that 6-to-9-year-old children are in the process of acquiring the use of optional lexical and morphosyntactic markers in production (e.g., discourse particles, information structure), but only 9-year-olds show adult-like patter…
Accent Perception in Heritage Speakers of Italian and Migrants from Italy
Little is known about how heritage speakers ( HS s) and first-generation migrants perceive global accents, including those of their own peers. Our study compares the accent perception of 107 Italian-speaking individuals belonging to three groups: HS s, migrants, and homeland controls. These three groups rated speech samples from second language learners (L2ers), homeland speakers, and other HS s. The results revealed that migrants perceive accent…
Accommodation or Adaptation? How L2 Reading Proficiency Affects Reading Strategies in EFL Learners with and without Dyslexia
This study investigates how reading proficiency in an orthographically opaque foreign language (L2 English) modulates word recognition and decoding strategies of Italian adolescents with and without developmental dyslexia (DD), whose native language orthography is highly transparent. The size of the visual and phonological units that are processed while reading is modulated by the orthographic depth of the language being read. In the case of earl…
Development and initial validation of a yes/no vocabulary test for North Sámi
This paper accounts for the development and initial validation of a yes/no vocabulary test of North Sámi called North Sámi Vocabulary Test (NSVT). North Sámi (NS) is an Indigenous language spoken in northern Scandinavia. Being an endangered language, NS is in need of revitalisation efforts. One contribution is the provision of proficiency assessment tools. We administered a 75-item NSVT version (50 real verbs and 25 pseudoverbs) to users of North…
Creating vocabulary tests for minoritized languages with typologically close contact languages
Aims and Objectives/Purpose/Research Questions: Our paper outlines the development of vocabulary proficiency tests for minority languages and addresses the challenges in doing so. Design/Methodology/Approach: The strategies are exemplified based on recently developed tests for Sicilian and Venetan, two large languages in Italy without official status. Users of these types of languages tend to have only oral skills, some only receptive. They are b…
The acquisition of rhetorical questions in bilingual children with Italian as a heritage language
Rhetorical questions (RhQs) are a complex phenomenon at the interface of pragmatics, prosody and syntax, which requires reasoning on intentions and goals, and which involves a mismatch between literal and intended meaning. In Italian, RhQs can be marked by optional particles and verbal morphology. We investigated when children aged 6-9 acquire the relevant patterns of optional modification and exploit them in the appropriate pragmatic context. In…
How English orthographic proficiency modulates visual attention span in Italian learners with and without dyslexia
Visual attention span (VAS) refers to the number of visual elements processed simultaneously in a multielement array. It is causally related to reading skills and may be impaired in readers with dyslexia. VAS is influenced by orthographic depth with opaque orthographies boosting it. Such orthography-specific VAS modulations are subject to crosslinguistic interactions in early biliterates, leading to advantages associated with learning to read in …
Phonological influence in bilectal speakers of Brazilian and European Portuguese
Aims and objectives: This article investigates naturalistic acquisition of a second dialect (D2), comparing the global accent of speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) exposed to European Portuguese (EP), either as children or as adults (early vs late bilectals). The focus is on the predicted advantage of an early age of onset of the D2, as well as possible crosslinguistic influence from the D2 onto the first dialect (D1). Design and methodology: …
How Bilingual Experience Shapes Accents in German-Italian Primary School Children
This study investigates the accents of German-Italian school children (6–10 years old) in their two languages. We ask whether accents in the bilingual children’s two languages are related and how foreign accentedness is associated with proficiency in other areas of language (speech rate, vocabulary size) and extralinguistic factors (formal and informal exposure and AoO in the majority language). Data from 87 early bilingual German-Italian childre…
Experience of discrimination in egalitarian societies
The Sámi people stand out as the only Indigenous minority in an egalitarian European context, namely the Nordic Countries. Therefore, inequalities that they may face are worth closer inspection. Drawing on the distinction between inequalities among individuals (vertical) and between groups (horizontal), we investigate how different types of inequalities affect the Sámi today. We formulate a series of hypotheses on how social, economic, cultural, …
Language change in Japanese–English bilingual returnee children over the course of five years
Few studies have examined global foreign accent (GFA) in bilingual children, and little is known about how GFA changes over time and what factors determine change. Here, we examine GFA trajectories in Japanese–English bilingual returnees (Japanese children who returned to Japan after having lived in a majority English environment for several years). In two accent-rating tasks, first language (L1) speakers of English or Japanese rated returnee spe…
When multilingualism is more than three
In this article we investigate transfer in the ab-initio acquisition of grammatical gender in two groups of multilingual learners. The first group knows two gender languages (German and French), which can potentially act as transfer sources; the second group knows three (German, French and Italian). Both groups had to assign gender to nouns in Franco-Provençal, a Romance language which is new to the learners, and which shares similarities with bo…
On the Role of Informal vs. Formal Context of Language Experience in Italian-German Primary School Children
This study focuses on the contexts of language experience in relation to language dominance in eighty-seven Italian-German primary school children in Germany using the MAIN narrative task. We compare current language experience in the heritage language (Italian) and the majority language (German) in both formal and informal settings, and we examine the respective impact on micro- and macrostructure measures, including different language domains. …
Monolingual comparative normativity in bilingualism research is out of “ control ”
Herein, we contextualize, problematize, and offer some insights for moving beyond the problem of monolingual comparative normativity in (psycho) linguistic research on bilingualism. We argue that, in the vast majority of cases, juxtaposing (functional) monolinguals to bilinguals fails to offer what the comparison is supposedly intended to do: meet the standards of empirical control in line with the scientific method. Instead, the default nature o…
Methodological challenges in working with Indigenous communities
n their epistemological article, Grenoble and Osipov (2023, henceforth G&O) touch on some of the practical and ideological difficulties in working with Indigenous communities, in particular in relation to their work with the Even communities in northeastern Russia. They mention low speaker numbers and the associated challenge of obtaining sufficient data, the practical difficulties of reaching these communities (both physically and digitally), th…
Rhetorical question comprehension by Italian–German bilingual children
This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker’s belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and lexical-syntactic cues. Being childhood learners, children have to acquire the concept of rhetoricity, but…
Structural and phonological cues for gender assignment in monolingual and bilingual children acquiring German. Experiments with real and nonce words
We investigate the acquisition of grammatical gender marking in German by monolingual children as well as German-Russian bilingual children who grow up in Germany as heritage speakers of Russian. We ask to what extent monolingual and bilingual children use phonological and/or structural cues to assign nominal gender, and to what extent they rely on lexical knowledge. To this end, we designed three experiments. Experiment 1 tests gender assignment…
Voice Onset Time in Multilingual Speakers
This study brings together two previously largely independent fields of multilingual language acquisition: heritage language and third language (L3) acquisition. We investigate the production of fortis and lenis stops in semi-naturalistic speech in the three languages of 20 heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with German as a majority language and English as L3. The study aims to identify the extent to which the HSs produce distinct values across …
Prepositional phrases and case in North American (heritage) Icelandic
The paper investigates the use of PPs, specifically prepositions and the case marking on their DP arguments, in moribund North American (heritage) Icelandic (NAmIce), using data from a map task experiment. Since prepositional phrases combine semantic properties with morpho-syntactic properties, PPs allow us to investigate the relative vulnerability of both domains at once. Our results show that while the prepositional inventory of NAmIce is not r…
Phonological vs. natural gender cues in the acquisition of German by simultaneous and sequential bilinguals (German–Russian)
We investigate German–Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system, where both formal and semantic cues are psycho linguistically relevant, German has weak phonological cues…
Experimental evidence for the interpretation of definite plural articles as markers of genericity – How Italian can help
In the Romance languages, definite plural articles (e.g., le rane ‘the frogs’) are generally ambiguous between a generic and a specific interpretation, and speakers must reconstruct the intended interpretation through the linguistic or extra-linguistic context. Following the “polar bear” paradigm implemented in Czypionka & Kupisch (2019)’s investigation on German, the goal of the present study is to check the suitability of their test on article …
Stable and vulnerable domains in Germanic heritage languages
This paper provides an overview of Germanic languages as heritage languages, i.e. languages acquired naturalistically by children in parts of the world where these languages are not the majority language. Summarizing research on different types of heritage speakers of Danish, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, we identify certain stable and vulnerable domains. We focus on the so far best studied areas, word order and grammatical gender, a…
Heritage language proficiency does not predict syntactic CLI into L3 English
This study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in the acquisition of embedded wh-questions in L3 English in German-dominant heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. Specifically, we investigate whether a higher proficiency in the heritage language Italian increases the potential for CLI from that language. To this end, 21 adult-aged Italian-German early bilinguals and 32 monolingual controls (L1 speakers of Italian, German, or English) completed…
Foreign Accent in Pre- and Primary School Heritage Bilinguals
Previous research has shown that the two languages of early bilingual children can influence each other, depending on the linguistic property, while adult bilinguals predominantly show influence from the majority language to the minority (heritage) language. While this observed shift in influence patterns is probably related to a shift in dominance between early childhood and adulthood, there is little data documenting it. Our study investigates …
Heritage language acquisition
This paper discusses the interplay between acquisition and theory construction. It endeavors to show how a more direct and crucially bi-directional relationship between formal linguistic theory and the study of heritage language bilingualism can provide mutual benefit. It will be argued that data from acquisition-not exclusively but indeed especially from heritage language bilingualism-provide windows into the tenability of formal linguistic prop…
Language history on fast forward
There has been a substantial amount of research on heritage language acquisition and diachronic change. Although recent work has increasingly pointed to parallels between those two areas, it remains unclear how systematic these are. In this paper, we provide a bird's eye view, illustrating how patterns of diachronic change are mirrored in heritage language grammars. In doing so, we focus on one of the best-described grammaticalization processes -…
Foreign Accent in Pre- and Primary School Heritage Bilinguals
Previous research has shown that the two languages of early bilingual children can influence each other, depending on the linguistic property, while adult bilinguals predominantly show influence from the majority language to the minority (heritage) language. While this observed shift in influence patterns is probably related to a shift in dominance between early childhood and adulthood, there is little data documenting it. Our study investigates …
Language change in Japanese–English bilingual returnee children over the course of five years
Few studies have examined global foreign accent (GFA) in bilingual children, and little is known about how GFA changes over time and what factors determine change. Here, we examine GFA trajectories in Japanese–English bilingual returnees (Japanese children who returned to Japan after having lived in a majority English environment for several years). In two accent-rating tasks, first language (L1) speakers of English or Japanese rated returnee spe…
Ultimate attainment of second language articles
An area of considerable interest in second language (L2) acquisition is the difficulties learners face with the acquisition of articles. This article examines the role of prosody in the acquisition of articles by an endstate L2 English speaker focusing on the free morphemes the and a. In order to analyse the articles produced by a Turkish speaker named SD, we used the Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2006) phonetic analysis software to determine the p…
Ultimate attainment of second language articles
An area of considerable interest in second language (L2) acquisition is the difficulties learners face with the acquisition of articles. This article examines the role of prosody in the acquisition of articles by an endstate L2 English speaker focusing on the free morphemes the and a. In order to analyse the articles produced by a Turkish speaker named SD, we used the Praat (Boersma and Weenink, 2006) phonetic analysis software to determine the p…
Restrictions on definiteness in second language acquisition
In this paper we investigate whether learners of L2 English show knowledge of the Definiteness Effect ( Milsark, 1977 ), which restricts definite expressions from appearing in the existential there-insertion construction. There are crosslinguistic differences in how restrictions on definiteness play out. In English, definite expressions may not occur in either affirmative or negative existentials (e.g. There is a/*the mouse in my soup ; There isn…
Gender assignment and gender agreement in adult bilinguals and second language learners of French
This paper is concerned with gender marking in adult French. Four groups of subjects are compared: German-French simultaneous bilinguals (2L1ers) who grew up in France, German-French 2L1ers who grew up in Germany, advanced second language learners (L2ers) who are resident either in France or in Germany at the time of testing. The major goal of the study is to investigate whether differences in input conditions (acquisition in a minority vs. a maj…
A new term for a better distinction? A view from the higher end of the proficiency scale
published
Foreign Accent in Adult Simultaneous Bilinguals
The study reported in this paper examines foreign accent (FA) in adult simultaneous bilinguals (2L1ers). Specifically, we investigate how accent is affected if a first language is acquired as a minority (heritage) language as compared to a majority (dominant) language. We compare the perceived FA in both languages of 38 adult 2L1ers (German-French and German-Italian) to that of monolingual native speakers (L1ers) and late second language learners…
Definite article use with generic reference in German
This study is concerned with the distribution of the definite article in German with plural nominals that have a generic reading . In Standard German, genericity is typically expressed by bare nouns ( Tiger sind gefährlich ‘Tigers are dangerous’). Many researchers have claimed that there is variation in article use in the expression of generic reference in German (e.g., Brugger 1993; Longobardi 1994; Krifka et al. 1995; Chierchia 1998; Dayal 2004…
Voice onset time and global foreign accent in German–French simultaneous bilinguals during adulthood
Aims and objectives: In this study, we investigated crosslinguistic influence in the phonetic systems of simultaneous bilinguals (2L1s) during adulthood. Methodology: Specifically, we analyzed the voice onset time (VOT) of the voiceless stop /k/ in the spontaneous speech of 14 German–French bilinguals who grew up in France or Germany. We looked at both languages, first comparing the groups, second comparing their VOT to their global accent. Data …
Restrictions on definiteness in the grammars of German-Turkish heritage speakers
This paper reports on a study investigating restrictions on definiteness (the Definiteness Effect) in existential constructions in the two languages of Turkish heritage speakers in Germany. Turkish and German differ in how the Definiteness Effect plays out. Definite expressions in German may not occur in affirmative or negative existentials, whereas in Turkish the restriction applies only to affirmative existentials. Participants were adults and …
Terminology matters II
published
Transfer into L3 English
This study is concerned with L3 acquisition in heritage speakers (HSs). The goals are to incorporate HSs into L3 acquisition research and investigate the role of language dominance for predicting L3 transfer. We analyze global accent in German-Turkish early bilinguals, HSs of Turkish, who acquired English as their L3. Twenty native-speaker judges determined accent strength and accent source in the speech of 18 bilinguals as well as 15 controls (L…
Terminology matters! Why difference is not incompleteness and how early child bilinguals are heritage speakers
This paper integrates research on child simultaneous bilingual acquisition more directly into the heritage language acquisition literature. The child simultaneous bilingual literature mostly focuses on development in childhood, whereas heritage speakers are often tested at an endstate in adulthood. However, insights from child simultaneous bilingual acquisition must be considered in heritage language acquisition theorizing precisely because many …
Differences in use without deficiencies in competence
Determining how and why adult outcomes of heritage speaker (HS) bilingualism differ from monolinguals is difficult because it requires the reconstruction of developmental paths from end-state data. In an effort to address this issue, we examine HSs of Turkish in Germany at an early age of development (10–15 years old, n = 22), as well as age-matched monolingual controls in Turkey (n = 20) and Germany (n = 20), using a structured elicitation task …
Heritage language acquisition
This paper discusses the interplay between acquisition and theory construction. It endeavors to show how a more direct and crucially bi-directional relationship between formal linguistic theory and the study of heritage language bilingualism can provide mutual benefit. It will be argued that data from acquisition-not exclusively but indeed especially from heritage language bilingualism-provide windows into the tenability of formal linguistic prop…
Internal and External Factors in Heritage Language Acquisition
In this paper we consider elicited production data (real and nonce words tasks) from five different studies on the acquisition of grammatical gender in Heritage Russian, comparing children growing up in Germany, Israel, Norway, Latvia and the UK. The children grow up in diverse heritage language backgrounds, ranging from small groups (in Norway) to large communities (in Latvia). Furthermore, the children vary with respect to family background (on…
Italian-German bilinguals
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: This study investigates perceived accent in the two early-acquired languages of 21 adult-aged bilinguals with Italian as the heritage language (HL) and German as the majority language (ML). We test the relative ability of ‘age of onset (AoO) in German’ (range = 0–6 years) and ‘Italian use’ to predict perceived nativeness in Italian and German. Design/methodology/approach: Two accent rating experimen…
Experimental evidence for the interpretation of definite plural articles as markers of genericity – How Italian can help
In the Romance languages, definite plural articles (e.g., le rane ‘the frogs’) are generally ambiguous between a generic and a specific interpretation, and speakers must reconstruct the intended interpretation through the linguistic or extra-linguistic context. Following the “polar bear” paradigm implemented in Czypionka & Kupisch (2019)’s investigation on German, the goal of the present study is to check the suitability of their test on article …
Stable and vulnerable domains in Germanic heritage languages
This paper provides an overview of Germanic languages as heritage languages, i.e. languages acquired naturalistically by children in parts of the world where these languages are not the majority language. Summarizing research on different types of heritage speakers of Danish, German, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish, we identify certain stable and vulnerable domains. We focus on the so far best studied areas, word order and grammatical gender, a…
Heritage language proficiency does not predict syntactic CLI into L3 English
This study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in the acquisition of embedded wh-questions in L3 English in German-dominant heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. Specifically, we investigate whether a higher proficiency in the heritage language Italian increases the potential for CLI from that language. To this end, 21 adult-aged Italian-German early bilinguals and 32 monolingual controls (L1 speakers of Italian, German, or English) completed…
Foreign Accent in Pre- and Primary School Heritage Bilinguals
Previous research has shown that the two languages of early bilingual children can influence each other, depending on the linguistic property, while adult bilinguals predominantly show influence from the majority language to the minority (heritage) language. While this observed shift in influence patterns is probably related to a shift in dominance between early childhood and adulthood, there is little data documenting it. Our study investigates …
Language history on fast forward
There has been a substantial amount of research on heritage language acquisition and diachronic change. Although recent work has increasingly pointed to parallels between those two areas, it remains unclear how systematic these are. In this paper, we provide a bird's eye view, illustrating how patterns of diachronic change are mirrored in heritage language grammars. In doing so, we focus on one of the best-described grammaticalization processes -…
Structural and phonological cues for gender assignment in monolingual and bilingual children acquiring German. Experiments with real and nonce words
We investigate the acquisition of grammatical gender marking in German by monolingual children as well as German-Russian bilingual children who grow up in Germany as heritage speakers of Russian. We ask to what extent monolingual and bilingual children use phonological and/or structural cues to assign nominal gender, and to what extent they rely on lexical knowledge. To this end, we designed three experiments. Experiment 1 tests gender assignment…
Voice Onset Time in Multilingual Speakers
This study brings together two previously largely independent fields of multilingual language acquisition: heritage language and third language (L3) acquisition. We investigate the production of fortis and lenis stops in semi-naturalistic speech in the three languages of 20 heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian with German as a majority language and English as L3. The study aims to identify the extent to which the HSs produce distinct values across …
Prepositional phrases and case in North American (heritage) Icelandic
The paper investigates the use of PPs, specifically prepositions and the case marking on their DP arguments, in moribund North American (heritage) Icelandic (NAmIce), using data from a map task experiment. Since prepositional phrases combine semantic properties with morpho-syntactic properties, PPs allow us to investigate the relative vulnerability of both domains at once. Our results show that while the prepositional inventory of NAmIce is not r…
Phonological vs. natural gender cues in the acquisition of German by simultaneous and sequential bilinguals (German–Russian)
We investigate German–Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system, where both formal and semantic cues are psycho linguistically relevant, German has weak phonological cues…
Monolingual comparative normativity in bilingualism research is out of “ control ”
Herein, we contextualize, problematize, and offer some insights for moving beyond the problem of monolingual comparative normativity in (psycho) linguistic research on bilingualism. We argue that, in the vast majority of cases, juxtaposing (functional) monolinguals to bilinguals fails to offer what the comparison is supposedly intended to do: meet the standards of empirical control in line with the scientific method. Instead, the default nature o…
Linguistics (33 works) · Psychology (30 works) · German (19 works) · Language Development and Disorders (19 works) · Heritage language (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (13 works) · Neuroscience of multilingualism (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Phonetics and Phonology Research (12 works)