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The proposed project will assess bilingual, trilingual, and quadrilingual speakers of different combinations of Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages on their phonological acquisition of an entirely foreign language- Modern Hebrew. This will be the first study to compare phonological acquisition of consonant clusters in a typologically distinct language between speakers of two, three, and four languages, allowing us to contribute to a long-standing debate in the field: do multilinguals have a cognitive advantage in subsequent language learning, or are they only transferring knowledge from previously acquired languages? This study will yield valuable theoretical implications in language acquisition and applications in the field of foreign language learning. First, from a theoretical perspective, it will allow us to tease apart mechanisms of language acquisition to understand whether phonological acquisition is a general language function (wherein more acquired languages lead to a greater ability to acquire new phonologies) or specific to the known languages (wherein the ability to acquire a new phonological system depends on the phonologies of previously learned languages). Second, although studies on bilingualism are now abundant, and L3 acquisition is a steadily growing field, little work has been conducted on the acquisition of further languages, and less still within the field of phonology. Thus, this study will pave the way in understanding how increasingly multilingual systems may differ amongst each other and facilitate the acquisition of new languages. In the field of language learning and pedagogy, this research will elucidate the ways and extent to which prior language experience can be harnessed when acquiring a new language. As part of the dissemination aspects of this project, the researchers will collaborate closely with local teachers and language instructors, as well as language-learning companies, to maximize the practical impacts of our findings.
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