The production of geminates in Italian-dominant bilinguals and heritage speakers of Italian

This study examines cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in adult Italian-German bilinguals based on the production of gemination, a phenomenon that exists in Italian but not in German. We analyzed the spontaneous Italian speech of two groups of Italian-German bilinguals (heritage speakers of Italian and Italian-dominant bilinguals) and a monolingual Italian control group. The results show that the geminates produced by the speakers in both bilingual groups were longer than their singletons. From this it seems that gemination is not affected by CLI. Based on our results, we discuss whether CLI is determined by (1) markedness, (2) frequency of Italian input during acquisition, (3) language dominance or (4) relevance (e.g. phonemic status), concluding that the latter is most crucial.