Intonation in heritage languages

Intonation in heritage languages is a much less researched linguistic domain than,
for example, morphosyntax. This chapter reports on several studies
investigating the intonation of Russian and German bilingual speakers, based on the data
from the RUEG corpus, in their heritage language and/or in the majority language.
Section 3 addresses overall intonational features in (heritage) Russian, relating to
phrasing and frequency of pitch accents. Section 4 reports findings on intonation
used for various phenomena at linguistic interfaces, such as intonation in
(heritage) Russian yes/no questions (Section 4.1), for contrastive adjective focus in
(heritage) Russian (Section 4.2) and in discourse linking in heritage and majority
German (Section 4.3). Section 5 addresses the perception of accents by (heritage)
Russian listeners. Together, the studies reveal that heritage language speakers and
monolingually-raised speakers show differences in prosodic realization and
perception, although such differences are more quantitative than qualitative in nature.