This work presents an investigation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech production in his first language (L1), Austrian German, and his second language (L2), American English, over a period of 40 years. Schwarzenegger is a late consecutive bilingual who learned his L2 relatively late in life upon migrating to the United States at the age of 21. To examine his L1 and L2 speech development, three studies were conducted based on a corpus of English and German broadcast interviews, representing Schwarzenegger’s early (1970s/80s) and late (2010s) pronunciation. Studies I and II include acoustic investigations of his realization of voice onset time contrasts and his production of monophthongs, respectively. The results of the acoustic studies provided some evidence for L1 attrition of pronunciation, i.e., L2-induced changes observed in a speaker’s L1 speech production. Attrition effects became particularly visible in Schwarzenegger’s productions of plosives which have moved closer to L2 English production norms in the late stage. At the same time, his L2 productions were observed to have shifted away from monolingual L2 production norms in the late stage, i.e., he has become less native-like despite a considerable amount of L2-experience. Study III aimed to find out if Schwarzenegger is perceived to sound more or less native in his L1 German compared to monolingual Austrian German speakers by a group of 40 Austrian German listeners. In addition, it was examined if and to what extent perceived nativeness can be related to the comprehensibility and intelligibility of Schwarzenegger’s L1 pronunciation. Results showed that Schwarzenegger was indeed perceived to sound less native in his L1 compared to monolingual Austrian German control speakers. At the same time, his L1 speech was still clearly comprehensible and intelligible. It was also found that the listeners’ linguistic background significantly influenced their ratings. Bilingual listeners were more lenient in their nativeness judgments compared to monolingual listeners who were more likely to perceive Schwarzenegger as sounding less native compared to monolingual controls.
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