About
I run the Trilingualism Lab at Northeastern Illinois University. I train MA students to use ELAN for transcription and annotation of interview data, and Praat for acoustic analysis. We examine the effects and direction of crosslinguistic influences among the languages of trilingual speakers by systematically analyzing morphosyntactic and phonological features prone to language contact. Our overall goal is to determine if several features are affected simultaneously by sociolinguistic factors that lead to contact-induced changes (e.g. a speakers' language dominance, age, attitudes towards the languages spoken), or whether some areas of each language are more resistant to change than others. We are currently working with naturalistic data from Transylvanian Saxon - German - Romanian trilinguals with different language dominance profiles. Transylvanian Saxon is an endangered Germanic language that has been transmitted orally over more than 8 centuries in Romania and more recently in immigrant communities in Germany. We work with data collected from trilinguals in Romania and in Germany.
Current focus
We are currently analyzing VOT ranges in Romanian, German, and Transylvanian Saxon to establish if some speakers exhibit a global accent influenced by their dominant language. German has aspirated voiceless stop, while Romanian does not. As for Transylvanian Saxon, this area has not been explored in previous studies. So far, we are finding that German-dominant speakers aspirate their voiceless stops in Romanian. Once we finish analyzing the Romanian data, we will move on to measure VOT ranges in German and Transylvanian Saxon. We will then compare the VOT ranges of speakers with different levels of language dominace in the three languages to better understand crosslinguistic influences and phonological variation in the three languages.
Future research
We will continue to analyze phonological variation once we are done with VOT measures. The next rule that we will look at is word-final obstruent devoicing. This rule is common in German, but not in Romanian. Impresionistically, we have perceived word-final devoicing in the Romanian of some of the participants living in Germany. We will, therefore, conduct a more systematic acoustic analysis to establish which participants tend to adopt this rule in their Romanian. We also wish to establish if this rule is present in Transylvanian Saxon as it has not been explored before.
