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Summary L3 acquisition has begun to attract the attention of many scholars in recent years. Heritage contexts are especially fruitful areas to understand how linguistic and nonlinguistic mechanisms interact with one another. The current study focuses on L3 English acquisition of object pronouns with L1 Turkish, L2 German speakers. We seek to find out whether the speakers could produce object pronouns accurately, whether L3 English proficiency has any effects on their acquisition, and finally, whether all object pronouns are acquired in the same way. Data for this study come from a corpus consisting of written and oral productions of 167 participants, who were students in four distinct grades, namely 5th, 7th, 10th and 12th graders at different schools in Berlin, Germany. The results reveal that participants were highly meticulous in their object pronoun use. Also, no clear L1 effect was observed, while L2 impact is implied. Lastly, proficiency and linguistic features are noted as significant factors that have an impact on L3 acquisition.

This article presents an empirical study on selected aspects of the orthographic performance of mono- and bilingual students in German. Particular attention is paid to the question whether a connection can be drawn between the orthographic performance of the bilingual students in German and their first language. For this purpose, a corpus is analyzed with data from approx. 800 test students. One group is monolingual in German, one is bilingual German–Turkish and one is bilingual German–Russian. A highly significant influence of Russian resp. Turkish on the performance to differentiate between tense and lax vowels is found. This corresponds to expectations insofar as in opposition to German, neither in Turkish nor in Russian, tense and lax vowels are distinguished phonologically. In other areas of orthography, this influence of the first language is not measurable or not to the same extent.

In the domain of motion event encoding, many of the world’s languages fall into one of two types: verb-framed (the path is encoded in the verb) or satellite-framed (the path is encoded outside the verb in a prefix, particle or adverbial while the verb contains information about the manner of movement). A number of studies have investigated the language usage of bilingual speakers or language learners to find evidence of a transfer of the typological pattern of the dominant/native language to the non-dominant/foreign language. These studies have largely failed to show evidence of a straightforward transfer, although more subtle effects on usage have occasionally been observed. In this paper, we report the results of a corpus study comparing two groups of speakers of the urban German ethnolect “Kiezdeutsch”: one with a monolingual German background and one with a bilingual Turkish-German background. We find no significant differences in their preference for path or manner verbs, which is consistent with other studies. However, in comparison with the monolingual German group, the Turkish-German group prefer semantically light motion verbs and they avoid the combination of manner verbs with path satellites. This is consistent with the fact that the analogous construction is ungrammatical in verb-framed languages like Turkish. In other words, we find variation within “Kiezdeutsch” that can be explained by a transfer of usage preferences from the background language.