Prosodic Mixes: Strategies in Multilingual Language Acquisition

The paper reports preliminary findings of an ongoing study of prosodic mixes in the speech of three trilingual siblings. The children are primary bilinguals in Portuguese and Swedish,and acquired English as the language of schooling. Prosodic mixes are defined as the intrusion of prosodic patterns of one language into another.

From the earliest stages of linguistic development, the children made use of prosodic strategies in order to communicate in their native languages, clearly indicating that they take prosody as a crucial conveyor of both linguistic meaning and linguistic identity. The current transfer of foreign intonation patterns to a native language involves pasting of English prosodic patterns onto segmental structures of Portuguese that are either equivalent or made equivalent to their English counterparts. The mixed patterns do not however replace all instances of corresponding adequate native patterns,suggesting that the process is not one of mechanical transfer but of experimentation.

In the light of these observations, it is argued that prosodic mixes constitute evidence of strategies that multilingual children appear to develop in their process of language acquisition,and that consist in testing,in other languages at their disposal,the meaningful patterns observed in one language.