Ecke 04 Attrition s

Language attrition and theories of forgetting: A cross-disciplinary reviewPeter EckeUniversity of Arizona

AcknowledgmentsThis project was funded in part by a Faculty Small Grant from the University of Arizona Foundation and the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies. I would like to thank Christopher Hall, Kees de Bot, Ulrike Jessner and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Muriel Saville-Troike and Merrill Garrett deserve credit for having spurred my interest in the topic years ago.

AbstractMy purpose in this paper is to examine the psychological nature of forget-ting (parts of) a language by individuals involved in language change across the lifespan. The objectives of the article are (1) to summarize psychological theories and hypotheses about forgetting and memory failure, and (2) to evaluate their relevance for the explanation of individual language attrition. By reviewing linguistically and psycholinguistically oriented language attrition studies that appear to implicate mechanisms of forgetting, I seek to contribute to the interdisciplinary study and discus-sion of language attrition phenomena.

1 Introduction

The study of individuals’ language attrition has become a vibrant subfield of applied linguistics (Ammerlaan, Hulsen, Strating, & Yagmur, 2001; de Bot, 1996; de Bot & Weltens, 1995; Lambert & Freed, 1982; Weltens & Cohen, 1989). Language attrition in individual speakers may contribute to language change at the community and global level (cf. Meisel, 2001; Seliger, 1996). Some languages are gaining influence as first languages (L1) and second languages (L2) in a world characterized by globalization and migration, whereas other languages (often the L1 of minorities) and dialects are in decline and in danger of becoming forgotten (Crystal, 2000; Dorian, 1989; Grenoble & Whaley, 1998; Hyltenstam & Obler, 1989; Münstermann, 1989; Wong Fillmore, 1991). The knowledge and use of language(s) by individual speakers is in continuous flux. It is dynamic in nature and subject to change, that is, both to the acquisition of (novel) language structures and the attrition / loss of (obsolete) structures (Herdina & Jessner, 2002; Hyltenstam & Viberg, 1993). Whereas the growth of language skills has been a subject of scientific inquiry for a long time, the decline of language skills has been studied systematically only for

The International Journal of Bilingualism

321Running Head

Key words

cross-disciplinary

language attrition

theories of forgetting

Address for correspondence Peter Ecke, Department of German Studies, The University of Arizona, 301 Learning Service Building, P.O. Box 210105, Tucson, AZ 85721-0105, U.S.A.; e-mail: < [email protected] >.

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about 20 years, mostly by applied linguists (see Hansen, 2001; Lambert & Freed, 1982; Schmid & de Bot, in press; Seliger & Vago, 1991; Weltens, 1987; Weltens & Cohen, 1989). Only a limited number of studies have investigated language attrition with reference to psychological or psycholinguistic theories (cf. Ammerlaan, 1996; de Bot, 1999; de Bot & Stoessel, 2000; Kenny, 1996; Pan & Berko Gleason, 1986). On the other hand, psycho-logical studies about the remembering and forgetting of verbal and nonverbal information have devoted little or no attention to the forgetting of language in healthy individuals across the lifespan (e.g., Ashcraft, 1989; Golding & MacLeod, 1998; Schacter, 1996). Increasingly, however, also psychologists and speech scientists are becoming interested in the fields of bilingualism and language attrition (e.g., Kohnert, Bates, & Hernandez, 1999; McElree, Jia, & Litvak, 2000; Yeni-Komshian, Flege, & Liu, 2000).

The present article is an attempt to review psychological assumptions about forget-ting and research into language attrition that may be of common interest to psychologists and linguists. It is intended as a positive response to the question asked by Ammerlaan et al. (2001, p. 3): “… should linguists employ insights and notions from decades of psychological research on memory performance in their work, or merely dismiss the findings as being based on experimental work on a limited area of vocabulary?” Applied linguists have been skeptical with respect to the potential contribution of psychological theories to the study of language attrition. Weltens and Grendel (1993), for example, came to the conclusion that psychological theories of forgetting have relatively little to offer for the study of L2 lexical attrition (also Weltens, 1987). The present discussion represents a more optimistic view and intends to demonstrate that part of the general psychological insight into forgetting may be of value for hypothesis formation and explanation of language attrition, which in turn can reveal important insight into the functioning of the human language faculty (Slobin, 1977).

In the context of the present discussion, language attrition refers to the decline of any language (L1 or L2), skill or portion thereof in a healthy individual speaker. The review will take into account attrition at the phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels. Since most research has been conducted on the lexicon, however, lexical loss will somewhat dominate the present discussion. Because of space limitations, language loss due to brain injury (aphasia) or severe pathological changes due to aging (dementia) will not be included in the review (see, e.g., Hyltenstam & Stroud, 1993; Paradis, 1995, 2001). Studies of language shift (e.g., Fishman, 1972), that is, the gradual change of language use in generations of a community will only be considered if they encompass information on individual language loss.

The first part of the paper explores the phenomena of forgetting and language attrition in relation to each other. The second part summarizes main assumptions about forgetting advocated in psychological theories as a foundation for the paper’s third and main section that reviews findings from language attrition studies that seem consistent with or related to psychological explanations of forgetting.


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2 Forgetting and Language Attrition

Forgetting may result from failure in one of three basic components of remembering: encoding (the capture and acquisition of novel information), storage (the integration and permanent representation of information), and retrieval (the access to information when it is needed by the speaker). Two different types of memory have been assumed to carry out these functions. Short-term (or working) memory is a limited computational space that temporarily stores, monitors, and manipulates information. It is of crucial importance to any mental activity extended in time, including the acquisition and processing of speech, although certainly in some interaction with long-term memory, the memory system that is responsible for the permanent storage of information (cf. Baddeley, 1986, 1999; Spear & Riccio, 1994). In studies of language attrition, it is usually assumed that the encoding component had been intact, and that only what has been acquired can be forgotten. This implies that the basic problem of forgetting resides in either the storage or the retrieval of structures that had been acquired and retained at some point in the past and that were “lost” under certain conditions. However, attrition researchers have also acknowledged the need to take into account the possibility that linguistic structures have not been acquired (encoded) completely and that the instable storage of these structures may have contributed to poor performance and a sensation of forgetting (e.g., Isurin, 2000; Levine, 1996; Montrul, 2002; Saville-Troike, Pan, & Dutkova-Cope, 1995). This holds in particular for L1 attrition in bilingual children and L2 loss in post puberty L2 learners.

Four important question complexes appear of relevance for investigations into language attrition as well as for educational efforts to preserve and revitalize languages, L1 as well as L2:

(1) What is forgetting? Is it the loss of information (the decline of competence) or is it mani-fested in the impaired access of information (a performance / processing problem)?

(2) What are the causes of forgetting? Or formulated differently, what are the internal and external factors that contribute to the forgetting of language structures?

(3) What are the linguistic effects of forgetting? Which linguistic levels are affected by forgetting, to what degree and in what sequence? How does forgetting in one area (e.g., lexis) affect competence and performance in another (e.g., syntax)? How does the individual compensate for linguistic deficits?

(4) What are the social-psychological consequences of forgetting? How does forgetting affect the individual’s life, identity, or self ?

In practical terms, the answers to question (1) will have implications for attempts to recover or relearn (parts of) a language since they address the potential success of treatment of individual language attrition: Under what circumstances, at what cost, and to what degree is regaining the language possible? The responses to questions (2) and (3) will be of relevance with respect to the prevention of language attrition. What is necessary to maintain continuous language use and development? Insight into questions (4) could help educators, parents, and language planners make decisions as to whether and under what circumstances the forgetting of language should be prevented or resisted.


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3 Psychological explanations of forgetting

Seven theories / hypotheses about the forgetting of (verbal as well as nonverbal) infor-mation will be discussed concerning their potential relevance for research on language attrition: Repression / suppression, distortion, interference, decay, retrieval failure, cue dependency, and dynamic systems theory1. Other recent explanations of forgetting, for example, “the seven sins of memory” discussed in Schacter (2001), will be subsumed under the more familiar theories and conceptions above.

3.1Repression and suppression

This explanatory account of forgetting originated in the area of psychoanalysis and the works of Sigmund Freud. According to Freud, unpleasant or traumatic memories are repressed deliberately and deplaced from consciousness by the individual who intends to avoid recalling displeasing, negative, or traumatic experiences (see Freud, 1899 / 1961; Jones, 1993). Repression also has been used widely to denote a massive “repression mechanism that operates unconsciously and defensively to block out traumatic experi-ences” (Schacter, 1996, p. 255). The main difference between suppression and repression lies in the possibility to consciously retrieve the target information, which is presumed possible in the first case, whereas it is expected impossible in the second (Golding & Long, 1998). While some cognitive psychologists dispute the possibility of repression, most agree that intentional suppression (also directed forgetting) exists as a commonly used, essential human defense mechanism (see Golding & MacLeod, 1998). In this discussion, I will refer to repression / suppression as an (at least initially) intentional mechanism in which the individual refuses recalling / using a memory structure. Such refusal may entail the withdrawal of attention from an initially highly active memory structure by deliberately remembering another structure (cf. Bjork, 1998; Wegner, Eich, & Bjork, 1994).

3.2Distortion

The concept of distortion emphasizes the subjectivity and permeability of personal memories. Individual experiences, current knowledge, beliefs, values, and attitudes affect and change what a person remembers. The information retained in memory is being altered and restructured unconsciously (see Schacter, Coyle, Fischbach, Mesulam, & Sullivan, 1995). Unconscious restructuring may be caused or affected by internal factors as well as external factors. Distortion research has become important, for example, to evaluate eyewitness testimonies in court processes. Certain questioning techniques, information from third parties, and the rehearsal of testimonies, among other factors, were shown to lead to incorrect (distorted) recollections of to-be-recalled events (e.g., Wells, 1993).


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1 Dynamic systems theory is, strictly speaking, not a true theory of forgetting. However, it is included here because it attempts to address forgetting in relation to acquisition and other variables.



3.3Interference

According to interference theory, prior and posterior learning, retention, and processing of segments of information that compete with each other are responsible for the forget-ting of target information. On the one hand, information acquired at a later point in time can inhibit or block the recall of information that was acquired earlier (retroactive inhibition). On the other hand, information that was acquired in the past can interfere with the learning and recall of more recent or novel information (proactive inhibition). See Anderson, Bjork and Bjork (1994), Keppel (1968), and Postman and Underwood (1973). Concepts analogous to interference are “mental blocking” (Jones, 1989) and “competition” (Bates & MacWhinney, 1987). Contrary to the decay and transmission deficit hypotheses discussed below, proponents of blocking assume that previously activated competing items inhibit the retrieval of a target item.

3.4Decay

Decay is probably the oldest of all approaches to the explanation of forgetting. It assumes that information “evaporates” or declines gradually in memory through lack of use (Thorndike, 1914). The assumption implies that the frequency and recency of use of the structure (i.e., its continuous activation) is crucial for the maintenance and access of the information in memory. The lack of use of the information results in the dissipation of a “trace” that has been imprinted for a piece of information, represented in the brain.

3.5Retrieval slowdown and failure

Forgetting does not have to represent the total loss / elimination of information from memory (Ashcraft, 1989, 1998; Spear & Riccio, 1994), its principal problem may lie in achieving access of the desired information. As in decay theory, frequency of use is a crucial variable in models of information retrieval. In (modular) search models, differ-ences in retrieval speed are figuratively explained by means of autonomous storage bins (e.g., Forster, 1992, on lexical access). Frequently and recently used information is stored on top of the bin and rapidly accessible whereas infrequently used items are located at the bottom of the bin and require more time and effort to be accessed. Parallel search of various bins can be assumed for bilingual lexicons.

In neural network and spreading activation models, retrieval slowdown and failure are seen as a consequence of decreasing activation levels in neurons and processing units, and weakening connections between neurons and nodes respectively. The lack of activa-tion through infrequent use and the aging of connections in older adults cause deficits in the transmission of information (e.g., from the semantic level to the phonological level in word production) resulting in a decrease of retrieval speed and an increase of retrieval failure rates (e.g., Burke, 1999).





3.6Cue dependency

Advocates of “cue dependent retrieval” argue that forgetting is neither satisfactorily explainable as the decay of information nor as a consequence of interference. Higbee (1996) describes memory search as analogous to reviewing an extensive file cabinet. In order to quickly find the desired information in the cabinet, labels (cues) are needed to indicate the address of the location of the information. The recognition and use of cues is crucial for successful retrieval. Cue availability depends on the consistency of internal states of subjects, their feelings and mood (Bower, 1981) as well as the external environment in which learning and recall take place (Tulving & Madigan, 1970). Changes in context can reduce the availability of retrieval cues (Spear & Riccio, 1994). When the internal or external cues that were available during memorization are unavailable during recall attempts, the information is more difficult to retrieve.

3.7Interaction and dynamic systems

It is likely that various approaches offer relevant explanation for certain types of language attrition and that the described phenomena overlap and interact collectively in the complex cognitive systems of the bi- or multilingual speakers. In emergent, dynamic, self-organizing systems, “… formal structures of language emerge from the interaction of social patterns, patterns implicit in the input, and pressures arising from general aspects of the cognitive system” (MacWhinney, 1998, p. 199). Herdina and Jessner’s (2002) Dynamic Model of Multilingualism is an attempt to relate variables and phenomena, such as, language acquisition, language maintenance effort, transfer / interference, and loss of languages to each other. Learning an additional language is achieved only in competition to and at the cost of limited cognitive resources already used for the main-tenance of the other language system(s). According to the model, the acquisition of the novel language negatively affects the other language system(s) over time resulting in less acquisition and attrition of the previously acquired systems (Jessner, 2003). Only the speaker’s metalinguistic awareness and / or language learning aptitude counteract the decline of resources, use, and competence to keep the system at equilibrium with balanced environmental (communicative) demands and cognitive resources.

In the following, cases of language attrition will be reviewed that appear consistent with the psychological assumptions presented above. An attempt will be made to assess the significance of the theories of forgetting for language attrition research.

4 Forgetting Language

4.1Linguistic repression /suppression

Various language attrition studies suggest that individuals can suppress the use of a language because of social-psychological reasons (cf. Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000). Cases that seem consistent with language suppression have been reported in studies of children who had been removed from their native country to an environment where the L1 was not spoken. Three studies investigated L2 acquisition and L1 attrition in


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orphan children from Russia, the Ukraine, and China who had been adopted by U.S. families (Isurin, 2000; Nicoladis & Grabois, 2002; Saville-Troike et al., 1995). After a short time of initial resistance to the L2, the children progressed rapidly in the acquisi-tion of English, but also in the loss of the L1. The children started to refuse speaking in the L1, possibly because of their desire to assimilate in the new culture, acculturate in the terms of Schumann (1978) or simply because they associated the new language with the new people and places and stubbornly used the L2 accordingly (cf. Schmidt-Mackey, 1977; Slobin, Dasinger, Küntay, & Toupin, 1993). It is also conceivable that they wanted to forget about traumatic experiences and the past life as orphans that were related inseparably with their L1 (cf. also Tits, 1948, on the L1 loss of an adopted child refugee from the Spanish Civil War). Kouritzin (1999, p. 158) reported a related case of L1 loss by a girl who was abandoned by her family after the death of her mother and who asserted in retrospect that the loss of her L1 had been extremely beneficial to her. The person seemed to have distanced herself deliberately from past memories, identi-ties, and the language associated with them.

Immigrant children tend to give up their L1 more quickly and completely than adult immigrants, and young children lose more language than older children after moving to a different language environment (cf. Anderson, 2001; Jia & Aaaronson, 1999; Kaufman, 2001; Nicoladis & Grabois, 2002; Olshtain, 1989; Wong Fillmore, 1991; Yukawa, 1998). Such dramatic decline of the L1 in young children may be related to the incomplete acquisition of the L1, a still “incomplete identification” with the L1 culture (Kaufman, 2001), and consequently to a qualitatively poorer input that young children are exposed to (Jia & Aaronson, 1999). The avoidance of the L1 along with the desire to assimilate, some times under pressure from peers and teachers, has been reported of a number of immigrant children (Fishman, 1966; Fries, 1998; Kaufman & Aronoff, 1991; Kouritzin, 1999; Pfaff, 1981; Turian & Altenberg, 1991; Vilar Sánchez, 1995) as well as of young speakers of languages with a low status in multiethnic contexts (Bonner, 2001). In one (fairly typical) case, a girl refrained from speaking to her mother in the L1 (German) after acquiring English (L2) in the U.S. Years later, the young woman succeeded in using the L1 to a certain extent, but only with a foreign accent that clearly marked her identity as an American (Schulz, 1991). Most of these reports described children who only with deficiency and temporary resistance maintained part of the native language spoken by their parent(s) in a foreign country.

Other cases were reported of individuals who intentionally suppressed their L1 or who as parents discouraged or prohibited their children to use the L1 at home with the objective to support the school language (Denison, 1977; Hill & Hill, 1986; Lambert & Taylor, 1996; Wong Fillmore, 1991) or to protect themselves or their chil-dren from becoming victims of discrimination, stigmatization or racism (Kouritzin, 1999). Rodriguez (1982) provided an informative autobiographical account on how the Spanish native language was suppressed in his home and the devastating effect it had of disconnecting him from the family and changing his identity. Kouritzin (1999) presented multiple case histories of first and second-generation immigrants in a Canadian context, most of which suggest some degree of suppression of the L1 by the immigrant children and adolescents. The studies lead one to believe that children can intentionally suppress (in particular, speaking) the L1 for reasons of identity, language shame (Bonner, 2001),





the desire to integrate into the dominant (L2) group (Giles & Johnson, 1987) or to acculturate (Schumann, 1978).

The suppression and temporary loss of L1 competence is also apparent in several autobiographic works of highly successful adult immigrant writers who attempted to become native speakers of their L2 (cf. Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000). Cases of suppression are also evident in the reports of Jewish emigrants who had avoided speaking in their native (German) language until late in live. Schmid’s (2002) study of L1 attrition in 54 German-Jewish emigrants suggests that suppression is not uncommon in that population, and that the rate of language attrition is determined by the degree of persecution and suffering of the emigrants as well as the speakers’ identity, self-perception and attitudes towards the native language community. Schmid’s findings with respect to the emigrant’s language proficiency are also important. Although most emigrants have made little or no use of the L1 for more than 60 years, Schmid (p. 192) argues that they have maintained the full repertoire of linguistic knowledge and that mistakes in speech production merely reflect perceived insecurities and accessibility problems. Her findings suggest that the suppression of a solidly acquired first language by proficient adult speakers does not necessarily affect their language competence (see also Ammerlaan, 1996, p. 214). The results seem consistent with Neisser’s (1984) assumption of a “critical threshold” in language proficiency. Once a speaker reaches the threshold, s / he will be relatively immune to language attrition (cf. Pan & Berko Gleason, 1986; Tomiyama, 2000; van Ginkel & van der Linden, 1996; Weltens, van Els, & Schils, 1989, on similar views or corresponding findings).

De Bot and Clyne (1989, 1994) reported a related phenomenon of language develop-ment in elderly immigrants. They studied a group of Australian Dutch-English bilinguals who had been investigated by Clyne some 16 years earlier. The interesting finding of the study was not an increase of L1 (Dutch) attrition, but a revitalization of and rever-sion back to the L1. The shift back to the L1 was reflected in a preferred use of the L1, better recall in the L1, a decrease in L2 fluency, and an increased foreign (L1) accent in L2 speech. These findings raise interesting questions about the dynamics of language growth and decline, the temporal nature of language suppression, the possible degrees and limits of individuals’ attempts to assimilate in another group, and the likelihood of ultimate reversion to (or recovery of) the L1.

While it is likely that parents, peers, siblings, teachers, and the media all influence individual language choice and language suppression to some extent, it is relatively unclear what constitute the specific pressures to group conformity, identity, and assimi-lation. Which particular individual experiences make a child realize the value / vitality of one language and culture while rejecting and suppressing another? Is it the desire to be accepted by and interact with peers (Wong Fillmore, 1991), the magic displayed on TV or the stories in children’s books (cf. Jia & Aaronson, 1999; Kouritzin, 1999)? Under what conditions do speakers re-evaluate, revalue, and revitalize a low status language under attrition? That language reversion, recreation, and recovery are possible, in principle, has been documented (e.g., Fishman, 1991; Hinton & Hale, 2001; Kapanga, 1998; Schmid, 2002; Vakhtin, 1998). Fine-grained analyses of language use in specific social networks (de Bot & Stoessel, 2002) as well as first person narratives (Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000) could help to learn more about the effects that social psychological forces have on individual language suppression and maintenance.


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4.2Linguistic distortion

Human memory is subject to processes of continuous unconscious restructuring and change. It has been proposed that restructuring is an essential process in L2 learning (McLaughlin, 1990) and multilingual development, including attrition (Herdina & Jessner, 2002). While the discussion of suppression above has shown that individual beliefs, values, intentions, and drives can influence attrition to some extent, it is unclear to what degree these may lead to the restructuring of linguistic competence. Internal factors (e.g., language universals, general cognitive constraints) and external influences (L1 / L2 interference, lack of input data) certainly mediate between the social-psycho-logical drives and individual language development (see dynamic systems theory below). It is conceivable that speakers, who suppress a language (internal drive), who are no longer exposed to it and who are under the influence of another language (external factors) unconsciously modify L1 structures and / or use, for example, by speaking in the L1 with an L2 accent (e.g., Major, 1993) or by unconsciously modifying attributes of L1 syntax, such as word order (e.g., Larmouth, 1974). Distortion then may be conceived as a consequence of suppression, cross-linguistic influence, reduced input and other factors, but that would make it a rather fuzzy and immensely complex concept.

Seliger (1989, p. 176) points out that: “… the bilingual may lose a sense of what is grammatical for one or both of the languages and not be able to control the mixing of the two.” This view is consistent with the anecdotal reports of multilingual speakers who often state that they speak various languages, but none properly. Reduced language input, less opportunity to learn new structures and cross-linguistic influence may contribute to what is perceived by the bilingual as a blurring or fusion of initially different linguistic structures. Such development has been called convergence (e.g., Clyne, 1987; Huffines, 1991; Silva-Corvalan, 1991).

Teutli Olivera (2000) demonstrated that the proficient use of an L2 (English) nega-tively affected native (Spanish) speakers’ detection of orthographic errors in L1 texts. She compared a group of monolingual speakers of Spanish with a group of bilingual Spanish-English speakers concerning their ability to identify orthographic errors in an L1 text and found higher rates of nondetected errors in the bilingual speakers compared to the monolingual speakers. Similar problems with L1 orthography were reported by long-term resident overseas EFL teachers in Porte (1999). On the phonological level, Caramazza, Yeni-Komshian, Zurif, and Carbone (1973) reported a fusion of voice onset times (VOTs) in French-English bilinguals. The VOTs of the bilingual speakers were at an intermediate level between those of monolingual speakers of both languages. More recent experimental studies yielded similar findings of reduced pronunciation accuracy in groups of Korean-English bilinguals (Yeni-Komshian et al., 2000) and Italian-English bilinguals (Flege, Munro, & MacKay, 1995) compared to monolingual control groups. Jia & Aaronson (1999) reported a reduction of syntactic proficiency in Chinese-English bilinguals compared to monolingual speakers. For the lexical level, McElree et al. (2000) found that lexical retrieval speed and accuracy were negatively affected in (the L1 of) Russian-English bilinguals. These studies lend support to a dynamic view of bilingualism and indicate that achieving bilingual or multilingual competence is by no means an all win situation. Frequently acquisition is achieved only at the cost of (partial) loss and





divergence from monolingual norms, that is, a distortion of (monolingual) language competence (cf. Grosjean, 1989; Herdina & Jessner, 2002; Hyltenstam & Viberg, 1993; Pavlenko & Jarvis, 2002).

An alternative interpretation of distortion (as the internal restructuring of linguistic knowledge) relates to the potential effect of universal grammar (UG) on the changing performance of an attriter. It has been argued that UG principles are responsible for simplification, regularization and the reduction of marked (irregular) forms in language learners and attriters alike (e.g., Andersen, 1982; Clyne, 1992; Hansen & Chen, 2001; Seliger, 1996). When input is lacking, the marked values of the attriting language are reset to unmarked values (cf. Håkansson, 1995; Sharwood Smith & van Buren, 1991). Seliger and Vago (1991, p. 11), for example, presented cases of regularized past tense morphemes of irregular German verbs by language attriters who produced forms like er wißt (weiß) [ he knows ], er schleichte (schlich) [ he slunk ], er nimmte (nahm) [ he took ]. Analogously Olshtain (1989, p. 157) reported the overuse of the English past tense morpheme -ed in bilingual (Hebrew-English) children who produced forms, such as, gived, eated, and waked up in the L2 under attrition. In these cases, the marked form of a verb is replaced by the unmarked inflection. The overgeneralization of past tense morphemes, as observed above, is also common in L1 acquisition. Psychologists have proposed connectionist, frequency based models (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986) as well as innate rule based mechanisms (Marcus, Ullman, Pinker, Hollander, Rosen, & Xu, 1992) to account for patterns, observed in children’s acquisition of past tense morphemes in English, that is, the initial rote learning of irregular forms, the partial abandonment of irregular forms and overgeneralization of the regular form, and finally the correct use of regular and irregular forms (cf. Pinker, 2000). To my knowledge, no attempts have been made to simulate such regularization patterns in an attrition context in spite of the apparent analogy.

Researchers in the UG and minimalist frameworks have attempted to explain the different degrees to which language structures in attriters are affected by restructuring. Most of them hold that syntactic (core) structures, once fully acquired, are the most stable and invariant aspects of language representations, immune to attrition as the restructuring of competence. In this framework, attrition merely represents the loss of control over an invariant computational system (Platzack, 1996; Sharwood Smith & van Buren, 1991; Toribio, 2001). Restructuring and loss are expected to be limited to the lexicon, that is, the only source of linguistic variation according to the minimalist program (Chomsky, 1995). Along similar lines, Sorace (2000) has proposed that struc-tures that make semantic-pragmatic distinctions, that is, structures that are semantically interpretable (and peripheral to UG) are more vulnerable to attrition than structures that are purely morphosyntactic, that is, noninterpretable semantically (and central to the computational system of UG). However, Anderson (2001), studying the attrition of Spanish verb inflection in bilingual children, has predicted the opposite. Applying Bybee’s (1995) model of lexical morphology, she expected and found more attrition and higher error rates in the production of morphological markers that are peripheral to verb meaning and central to syntax (e.g., person / number) compared to tense / aspect inflection that share a high degree of semantic relevancy. Schlyter (1993) reported similar results in a study of Swedish-French bilingual children. In how far the contrasting results are


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due to differences between child and adult attriters and different acquisition histories remains an open question.

Particularly interesting cases of restructuring are products of language loss that diverge from the two or more competing languages involved, output data that are comparable to the products of pidginization and creolization (see Maher, 1991). Such instances, if proved free of interference, might provide information about core attributes of UG although they could conceivably also reflect constraints or limitations on general cognitive processing.

Relatively little is known about the conditions and degrees to which two grammars can or cannot merge into a dynamic interlanguage system. Further research is needed to evaluate the effects of low internal uniformity / consistency of linguistic structures, congruence between structures, and inadequate / incompatible input on the restructuring of grammars (Saville-Troike et al., 1995). While the concept of distortion as unconscious restructuring of language may have some initial appeal as a metaphor for the descrip-tion of language attrition, its identification and distinction from other factors, such as, interference, and decay represent serious methodological and theoretical problems.

4.3Language decay

Numerous investigations suggest that linguistic structures, which are infrequently used or not used at all over extensive periods of time, are affected by decay. A major source of evidence for such a view comes from studies of language forgetting in mono-lingual speakers who are not situated in a language contact environment. Older adults experience word finding problems, such as tip-of-the-tongue states, more frequently than younger adults (e.g., Brown & Nix, 1996; Burke, 1999; Gollan & Silverberg, 2001; Lovelace, 1991; Maylor, 1990). Older adults also produce more spelling errors than young adults (MacKay & Abrams, 1998), that is, they frequently experience problems retrieving orthographic knowledge. (See, however, de Bot, forthcoming, on variables that counteract forgetting in the elderly.) Increased rates of retrieval failures in older people have been attributed mostly to a biological decline that leads to a weakening of connections between conceptual / semantic representations and phonological represen-tations, the so-called transmission deficit hypothesis (cf. Burke, 1999). Schwartz (2002) subsumes this explanatory account under the term decrement theory. An alternative view attributes the high rates of word finding problems in older adults to incremental knowl-edge (Dahlgren, 1998): Older people know more words than younger adults (Salthouse, 1991), and consequently fail to retrieve words more frequently, simply on quantitative grounds. Related to the incremental view is the possibility of increased interference from lexical items that compete with the target for access, the so-called blocking hypothesis (Jones, 1989). Most empirical studies, however, suggest that interference is not the main cause of the frequent retrieval failures in older people. Compared to young adults, older subjects report less frequently partial target information and the recall of related words (blockers) that potentially interfere with target recall (e.g., Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991; Heine, Ober, & Shenhaut, 1999; Rastle & Burke, 1996).

Studies of elderly immigrants who have not or infrequently used their L1 for many years, have reported similar deficits in lexical production, and also, but to a lesser





extent, in comprehension (Amerlaan, 1996; Kenny, 1996; Levine, 1996; Schmid, 2002; Yagmur, de Bot, & Korzillus, 1999). The extended period of no or reduced language use can affect the lexicon (Amerlaan, 1996; Clyne, 1972; Lestrade, 2002; Olshtain & Barzilay, 1991) and the morphological system (Anderson, 2001; Kaufman & Aronoff, 1989, 1991; Levine, 1996; Reetz-Kurashige, 1999).

The effect of infrequent L1 use is also notable in young bilingual (heritage) speakers. School and college students with Hispanic background in the U.S. are a case in point (cf. Fishman, 1966; Hakuta & D’Andrea, 1992; Lambert & Taylor, 1996; Silva-Corvalan, 1994). Spanish is the first language for many of these individuals and spoken prima-rily in the family. However, with entrance to school, English frequently becomes the dominant language and Spanish is used less frequently and in limited contexts only (Hernandez & Charney, 1998). Various studies suggest lexical decay in speakers who have been subject to such linguistic change (cf. Ecke, in press; Silva-Corvalan, 1991, 1994, Toribio, 2001). However, these findings do not automatically lend support to the assumption that a reduction in speakers’ competence and / or performance is a direct consequence of time, that is, the reduction of input from the L1 (de Bot, Gommans, & Rossing, 1991; El Aissati & Schaufeli, 1998; Gollan & Silverberg, 2001; Pease-Alvarez, Hakuta, & Bayley, 1996). In most of these cases, also contact with and interference from the second and dominant language and incomplete acquisition may have contributed to the loss of L1 structures.

Studies of L2 attrition also appear, at least in part, consistent with the concept of decay. Smythe, Jutras, Bramwell, and Gardner (1973), who studied high school students’ loss of French, found a progressive rate of L2 loss. Students who spent a longer period of time without L2 input lost more language structures than students who spent a shorter time period without exposure to the L2 (also Yoshitomi, 1999). Most importantly, Bahrick’s (1984) study on the retention of school-learned Spanish suggested that a fixed amount of information is being lost steadily, and independently from the speakers’ proficiency level. The forgetting of L2 structures was more pronounced immediately after training and leveled off with time, a pattern also reported by Weltens, van Els, and Schils (1989). The finding is consistent with what was named the normal forgetting curve by the psychologist Ebbinghaus (1885) more than a century ago, but is inconsistent with the assumption of an initial plateau, characterized by little or no language loss up to six or seven months after the end of exposure to the language (Kaufman & Aronoff, 1991; Kuhberg, 1992; Tomiyama, 1999; van Ginkel & van der Linden, 1996; Weltens & Cohen, 1989).

An important issue related to decay is the question whether an order or sequence of structural loss can be predicted. Analogous to the assumptions of stages of L1 devel-opment (Brown, 1973) and L2 acquisition (Dulay & Burt, 1974), it was asked whether language attrition would proceed in predictable stages reverse to acquisition (e.g., Cohen, 1975; Olshtain, 1989). It was hypothesized that the most complex or difficult-to-process structures (Pfaff, 1991; Slobin, 1977) that are acquired late get lost first, and that the less complex, easy-to-process structures that are acquired early, largely remain resistant to loss (Bailey, 1973). Forgetting last-learned structures first and maintaining first-learned structures best has been called the regression hypothesis (Hyltenstam & Viberg, 1993; Jakobson, 1941). While various researchers state that evidence for


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regression, as a mirror of acquisition, has been sparse to date (Caramazza & Zurif, 1978; de Bot & Weltens, 1991; Håkansson, 1995; Hedgcock, 1991; Schmid & de Bot, in press), others claim to have found some support for regression with respect to a limited number of morphosyntactic structures.

Cohen (1975) studied the patterns of L2 loss in three second-grade students after summer recess from an intensive Spanish immersion program. He found that some of the structures learned last were also the first to be forgotten and reported evidence for regression in the children’s use of the simple present tense, the ser / estar [ to be ] distinction and the definite article. Hansen (1980, 1999) and Hayashi (1999) found that the attrition of morphemes of negation in American learners of Hindi-Urdu (L2) and American and Micronesian learners of Japanese (L2) proceeded in an order reverse to acquisition. Hansen and Chen (2001) discovered regression patterns in the syntax and semantics of numeral classifier systems in L2 learners of Chinese and Japanese. Berman and Olshtain (1983) and Olshtain (1989) detected signs of regression in young bilingual children who over-regularized English past-tense morphology after their return to a Hebrew-speaking environment. Olshtain (1989), however, acknowledged that the instable acquisition of verb morphology might have contributed to the loss pattern in the five to eight year old children. Anderson (2001) reported that the two Spanish-English bilingual children, she studied, regressed to an earlier developmental stage in which the third person singular form served as a default form for Spanish verb use. Kuhberg (1992) interpreted his findings on the attrition of German in two Turkish children (ages 7 and 9) as support for the regression hypothesis. He claimed that lexical loss and the attrition of the morphological system largely proceeded in reverse order to the stages of acquisition.

Unfortunately, the lack of detailed quantitative data on acquisition and regression patterns limits the meaningfulness of some of the findings cited above. Although the regression hypothesis has received considerable attention and some support from L2 attrition studies and studies conducted with bilingual children, it appears to be too unre-fined to adequately predict and explain most language attrition patterns, especially those in adult native speakers. The findings from Jordens, de Bot, and Trapman (1989) seem consistent with such an assumption. They compared the use of German case marking in two groups of (potential) attriters: university students who had learned German as an L2 in secondary school, and adult German immigrants who had lived in the Netherlands for more than 10 years. Whereas the researchers found evidence for regression and overuse of the nominative case in the L2 learners, analogous to patterns in acquisition, they did not find indications of regression in the adult immigrants. Whereas various factors influencing acquisition and attrition (input frequency, perceptual salience / complexity of structure, semantic transparency, similarity between L1 and L2 equivalents) may correlate with the general courses of language development, other factors (e.g., domain-specific language use, context effects, speaker’s proficiency, age, intelligence, interests, and metalinguistic awareness) may counteract regression patterns.

The investigation of language decay, as the actual erosion or dissipation of language structures, will remain important in future research since it relates to the very nature of forgetting as either a competence or a performance problem. The relevance of decay for the attrition of lexical information (and its neurological bases) is especially strong.





Methodologically it will be relatively easy to provide evidence against cases of decay if it can be shown that language structures are intact and that attrition is only a processing problem due to the temporary unavailability of retrieval cues or the interference of structures from a competing language. Providing evidence for decay is more difficult. Research will have to focus on receptive skills (e.g., Jia & Aaronson, 1999; Köpke & Nespoulous, 2001; McElree et al., 2000; Seliger, 1991) since their attrition appears more indicative of loss than impaired productive skills that frequently only reflect accessibility problems. However, even impaired receptive skills may be deceptive with respect to the apparent loss of structure since more sensitive measures, such as relearning / reactiva-tion paradigms (cf. de Bot & Stoessel, 2000) may well detect linguistic knowledge at a subthreshold level that is neither accessible in production nor reception.

4.4Language retrieval slowdown and failure

Some psychologists argue that total loss of information is impossible after the information has been transferred to and stored in permanent (long-term) memory (cf. Ashcraft, 1998, but see Loftus & Loftus, 1980 for a critique of that view). They assume that forgotten information is not erased from memory, but that the access routes have become deterio-rated, in particular, in recall and production tasks. The simple fact that productive skills are more affected by failure than receptive skills illustrates the principle of that concept. It is possible that a person recognizes the meaning of a word in a text or phrase; however, s / he may not be able to retrieve the word when it is needed for production. The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon is a case in point. In a TOT state, the speaker is certain that s / he knows the target word, feels close to finding it without, however, recalling it in its completeness. TOT states are common experiences in the L1 (e.g., Brown, 1991; Brown & McNeill, 1966; Schwartz, 2002) as well as in the L2 (e.g., Ecke, in press; Ecke & Garrett, 1998; Gollan & Silverberg, 2001). The fact that most speakers recover the word on the tip of their tongue shows that these memory failures are not cases of information loss, merely failures of access. Language attrition studies reported that speech produc-tion problems, especially lexical retrieval failures, are more pronounced compared to failures of receptive skills (e.g., Bahrick, 1984; Cohen, 1975, 1989; Kaufman & Aronoff, 1989; Merino, 1983; Tomiyama, 1999, 2000; Waas, 1996). Attrition studies documented frequent or increased dysfluency, pausing, hesitation, and self-repair in speakers’ word production (Amerlaan, 1996; Kenny, 1996; Pavlenko, 2003; Tomiyama, 1999; Waas, 1996; Yukawa, 1998) and lexical retrieval failures, similar to TOT states, with subsequent extensive search and successive nontarget retrieval before the speakers eventually recall the intended structure (Amerlaan, 1996; Cohen, 1975, 1989; Olshtain & Barzilay, 1991). Unfortunately, investigators frequently have not provided comparative analyses of both productive and receptive skills. Exceptions are Ammerlaan (1996), de Bot and Stoessel (2000), Jia (1998), and Köpke and Nespoulous (2001) who showed through grammaticality judgment or lexical recognition tasks (L2 to L1 translation and picture-word matching) that receptive skills and grammatical or lexical knowledge can be affected by attrition as well, though to a lesser degree than production.

Various studies documented a slowdown of L1 retrieval speed in bilinguals. Mägiste (1986) used a battery of productive and receptive tests to investigate language-retrieval


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speed in German native speakers living in Sweden. Three groups of German-Swedish bilinguals (German-dominant, balanced, and Swedish-dominant speakers) were admin-istered word naming and picture naming tasks, the interlingual Stroop color task, and a reading task to process two-digit numbers in both German (L1) and Swedish (L2). In general, she found that the newly arrived German-dominant immigrants performed faster in L1, the balanced group achieved similar performance rates in the L1 and the L2, whereas the Swedish-dominant group (those immigrants who had spent 5 or more years in Sweden) showed advantages of processing speed in the L2 compared to the L1.

In a series of studies, Segalowitz and colleagues investigated the potential influ-ence of advanced skills in L2 (as measured by reading scores) on processing speed in the L1. English-French bilinguals who read their L2 at the same rate as their L1 were categorized as Same Rate bilinguals; bilinguals who read more slowly in their L2 were referred to as Different Rate bilinguals. Favreau and Segalowitz (1982) found that the Same Rate bilinguals were significantly slower readers in L1 compared to the Different Rate bilinguals and suggested that extensive exposure to the L2 may relate to a slowdown in performance in the L1. The results were confirmed in a subsequent study conducted by Segalowitz and Hébert (1990). Using a set of primed lexical decision tasks, Segalowitz (1991) again found a reduction of L1 processing speed for a group of Same Rate bilinguals suggesting that very high levels of L2 skills are associated with slower reading speed in the L1. The results of the latter study, however, also suggested that the increase in reading time could not be attributed to a slowdown of automatic word recognition, but rather to a delay of controlled postaccess processes, such as, semantic categorization and schema building that are affected by subjects’ intentions and expectations.

McElree et al. (2000) conducted an experimental study to investigate the speed of conceptual retrieval (the mapping from orthographic form to meaning) in three groups of Russian-English bilinguals (Russian-dominant, balanced, and English-dominant speakers). In their experiments, the subjects completed a timed semantic categoriza-tion task deciding whether pairs of words belonged to the same or a different semantic category. Retrieval speed was slower and categorization less accurate for the same and different language pairs with items from the nondominant language, even when it was Russian, the subjects’ L1. The results implicate attrition as reduced retrieval speed of form-meaning mappings, that is, receptive skills, in the nondominant native language. The authors attribute the results to a transmission deficit between the nondominant form and meaning (a kind of decay of direct retrieval routes) that is compensated by a mediation process via the form equivalent of the dominant language. Such mediated access is analogous to lexical mediation (the word association hypothesis) assumed for early stages of L2 vocabulary acquisition (cf. Hall & Ecke, 2003; Jiang, 2000; Kroll & Stewart, 1994; Potter, So, Von Eckardt, & Feldman, 1984).

In sum, retrieval slowdown and failure (mostly reported for lexical production, but also observed in reception) are among the first and strongest indicators of language attrition (cf. Weltens & Grendel, 1993). Understanding their functioning is of crucial importance for the study of language attrition. Although retrieval slowdown and failure can be detected relatively easily, their distinction from other phenomena is not that straightforward. The deterioration of retrieval routes (decay) may go hand in hand with the reorganization and mediation of access procedures via more efficient or dominant retrieval





routes (McElree et al., 2000), and such mediation, in turn, may be subject to increased interference from the dominant language (Costa, Miozzo, & Caramazza, 1999).

4.5Linguistic interference

Interference (Weinreich, 1953), also labeled transfer (Færch & Kasper, 1989; Singleton, 1987) and cross-linguistic influence (Sharwood Smith & Kellerman, 1986), depending on how researchers perceive its scope and its positive or negative effects, has received much attention in research of L2 and L1 acquisition, use, and loss. The phenomenon has been documented primarily in studies of L1 influence on L2 learning (e.g., Gass & Selinker, 1992; Ivanov, 1990; Ringbom, 1987), recently in studies of L1 and L2 influence on L3 learning (Cenoz, Hufeisen, & Jessner, 2001), but also in studies of L1 attrition (e.g., Py, 1986; Sharwood Smith, 1989) and language change (Yang, 2000). The large majority of cases of language attrition are embedded in contexts of language change for the bilingual individual and often community (Hyltenstam & Viberg, 1993) through which generally two or more languages compete for cognitive resources in the individual speaker. As a consequence of competition and limited available resources (Bates & MacWhinney, 1987), one language or language structure gains importance and frequency of use at the cost of another (Herdina & Jessner, 2002; Kohnert et al., 1999; Seliger & Vago, 1991).

Investigations into L1 forgetting under the influence of a dominant L2 have presented evidence of retroactive interference, primarily in the lexicon (e.g., Ammerlaan, 1996; Köpke & Nespoulous, 2001; Schaufeli, 1992). The interference of more recently learned and increasingly dominant L2 structures can be reflected by instances of borrow-ing / codeswitching (e.g., Clyne, 1987; Myers-Scotton, 1998; Saville-Troike et al., 1995; Yagmur, de Bot et al., 1999), loan translation, meaning extension, and meaning-related substitution (e.g., Boyd, 1993; de Bot & Clyne, 1994; Olshtain & Barzilay, 1991; Pavlenko, 2003; Romaine, 1995; Turian & Altenberg, 1991), syntactic frame errors, for example, violations of words’ subcategorization values (e.g., Altenberg, 1991; Jarvis, 2003), sound-related substitution errors (e.g., Romaine, 1995; Schmid, 2002) and a decrease in lexical diversity, lexical variation, and accuracy of collocation in attriters’ speech or writing (e.g., Andersen, 1982; Laufer, 2003; Olshtain & Barzilay, 1991). Retroactive interference was found instrumental in the loss of vocabulary in a learning and recall experiment (Isurin & McDonald, 2001) in which subjects memorized and recalled the names of pictures in an L2, and later in an L3. A third recall test of the initially learned L2 words showed evidence of retroactive interference (L2 word loss), which was particularly strong if semantically similar L3 words (translation equivalents) had been learned compared to words of other concepts. In addition to similarity, also amount of exposure to the L3 affected the extent of loss. The authors noted that the results resembled the loss patterns found in a naturalistic study of child L1 attrition (Isurin, 2000).

Morphological structures of L1 can also be subject to interference from L2. They can be simplified, abandoned or replaced by “free, regular and invariant morphemes” that are modeled on similar structures of the dominant language (Andersen, 1982, p. 109). One documented case is the loss of nominal inflections for grammatical gender and / or gender agreement under the influence of a language that does not possess gender markings. Deficits in gender agreement and assignment have been reported for speakers


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of Czech and English (Saville-Troike et al., 1995), Yiddish and English (Levine, 1996), German and English (Schmid, 2002), Hebrew and English (Kaufman & Aronoff, 1989), Isleño and English (Lestrade, 2002) and in speakers of Spanish in various contact situ-ations (Buenrostro, 1998; Ecke, in press; Toribio, 2001; Vargas Monroy, 1998). Another documented case is the simplification of verbal morphology in the L1 (Spanish) of Spanish-English bilinguals (cf. Anderson, 2001; Montrul, 2002; Silva-Corvalan, 1991; Toribio, 2001). It is important to point out that the phenomenon of simplification can also be attributed to other factors, for example, the cognitive complexity of structures and their processing (Pfaff, 1991; Slobin, 1977), the reduction of redundancy in gram-mars to create a more parsimonious system (Seliger, 1989), and the sequence of their acquisition (Hansen, 1999).

Some researchers consider (L1) syntax more resistant to the influence of L2 struc-tures and attrition compared to lexical and morphological structures (e.g., Andersen, 1982; Haugen, 1953; Köpke & Nespoulous, 2001; Pavlenko & Jarvis, 2002; Prince, 1997; Reetz-Kurashige, 1999; Sorace, 2000; Tomiyama, 1999; Toribio, 2001). However, other studies have shown that syntactic structures of L1 do change as well under the long-term influence of an L2 (e.g., Altenberg, 1991; Boyd & Andersson, 1991; Clyne, 1987; Myers-Scotton, 1998; Py, 1986; Schaufeli, 1996; Schmid, 2002; Sharwood Smith, 1983; Yagmur et al., 1999; Yukawa, 1998). Larmouth (1974), for example, reported the reduction of word order variation in Finnish as a consequence of loss of inflectional morphology in an environment that was dominated by L2 (English) use.

Extreme changes on the syntactic level have also been reported for speakers of languages, close to extinction (Schmidt, 1991) and dying languages that were revital-ized subsequently by their speakers (Vakhtin, 1998). Schmidt (1991) documented the transformation of an exceptionally free word order in traditional Dyirbal into rigid SVO order, along with a weakening case system and a breakdown in agreement rules under the influence of a local variety of English. Vakhtin’s (1998) discussion of the Copper Island Aleut language provides an interesting account on how the speakers of a (once thought to be) dying language adopted the Russian morphosyntactic system while maintaining and revitalizing the Aleut lexical basis. Note, however, that the latter studies did not focus on individual speakers’ forgetting, rather on language death / change over generations of speakers.

While interference is widely recognized as a main contributor to language attri-tion, several puzzles related to its operation remain unresolved. One issue concerns the typological similarity of the competing languages: Are two similar (congruent) language structures more subject to conflict, problems of discrimination and interfer-ence compared to two different consistent language structures as suggested by Altenberg (1991), Clyne (1992), Isurin, and McDonald (2001) and Saville-Troike et al. (1995) or are similar structures, in general, more resistant to loss compared to differing structures (cf. Andersen, 1982; Romaine, 1995)? How strong is interference on the different processing levels (conceptual / semantic, syntactic, lexical, morphological, phonological)? What are the main sources of interference in tri- or multilingual speakers where more than two languages potentially interact? Is it the last or most recently learned language (Shanon, 1991), the other foreign or native language (Meisel, 1983), the psycho-typologically closest other language (Kellerman, 1983), the most dominant language (Mägiste, 1986),





or the language with the proficiency level and amount of exposure closest to the affected language? Does the strength of interference change over time? Do periods of enhanced interference coincide with major restructuring processes? Anecdotal and some empirical reports suggest that interference as language mixing is particularly strong in early childhood (Berman & Olshtain, 1983), after rigid changes in language input (Kravin, 1992), and during the first year(s) of immersion or intensive language learning whereas it may decrease with age, time, and even the termination of language learning / use that, perhaps, lead to a stabilization of the language systems (cf. the reports of proficiency gains in Cohen, 1975; Weltens et al., 1989).

An issue related to interference concerns the bilingual’s ability to counteract or control interference by inhibiting the language(s) not intended for immediate use. Such an inhibition mechanism can be assumed to have a positive effect on language develop-ment and maintenance. Inhibiting the nontarget language could essentially reflect a cognitive skill to manage and select attention for the use of one language at one time. Green (e.g., 1986, 1998) repeatedly argued that the control of interlingual interference is a main issue in bilingual speech and proposed a supervisory attentional system that enables bilingual speakers to inhibit potentially competing language structures. However, others have argued that models of activation may suffice and that there is no need for an underlying inhibitory mechanism to explain bilingual speech processing (e.g., Grosjean, 2001; Roelofs, 1998).

Speakers who identify one language with one speaker (or place) and who are able to use one language while suppressing the other, depending on the communicative partner and situation, have been reported successful in the development and maintenance of bi- or multilingual language competence (e.g., Schmidt-Mackey, 1977). On the other hand, bilingual (Chicano) children who receive and produce freely interchanged input in two languages with the same speaker were shown, in at least one study, to experience more loss in the nondominant language than speakers who either use English or Spanish with individual speakers (Merino, 1983). Other studies also imply to take seriously the hypothesis that the ability and commitment to temporarily suppress one language, that is, to avoid codeswitching while using the other, counteracts attrition (see Andersen, 1982; Huffines, 1991; Kuhberg, 1992; Porte, 2003) and a turnover of the matrix language (cf. Halmari, 1992; Myers-Scotton, 1998). Bolonyai (1998) convincingly agued that the syntactic frames of lexical forms, frequently borrowed from the dominating L2, would erode the phrasal structure of the L1 since sentence production is primarily lexically driven (cf. Myers-Scotton, 1998). Thus, it is the abstract syntactic properties of lexical entries from the interfering language that can deteriorate a nondominant syntax through frequent use over time. Other researchers, however, claim that lexical borrowing and codeswitching does not necessarily contribute to or indicate beginning language loss (cf. Romaine, 1995). Fuller (1996), for example, presented evidence for convergence of morphosyntactic structures in communities that deliberately resisted codeswitching. Also, contrary to what interference theory would predict, Poplack (1980) has suggested that intrasentential codeswitching may be an indicator of high proficiency and a more balanced bilingualism; and Schjerve-Rindler (1998) has argued that codeswitching does not accelerate attrition and language shift and that it may even contribute to language maintenance.


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While numerous studies have shown a correlation or coincidence between codeswitching behavior and language attrition (e.g., Clyne, 1987, 1992; Kuhberg, 1992; Myers-Scotton, 1998; Pfaff, 1999), it is still controversial whether codeswitching can be assumed a “precursor” of language attrition (Seliger & Vago, 1991), an indicator and “warning sign” of possible L1 loss (Halmari, 1992) or a substantial contributing factor to language loss (Bolonyai, 1998; Porte, 2003). Similarly, little is known about changes in codeswitching, depending on age, linguistic maturity and cognitive development (Vihman, 1998) and whether certain personality types or cognitive styles correlate with codeswitching versus language differentiation / inhibition behavior and how these may affect the individuals’ rate of language loss (cf. Grosjean, 1995; Vihman, 1998). More studies of individual differences (including variation in age, gender, and language profi-ciency) among attriters are needed to ascertain the bilingual’s cognitive potentials and limits to reduce cross-language interference.

4.6Cue-dependent language retrieval

Psychological investigations have shown that the external environment and the internal state (mood) that subjects were in during memorization can affect information retrieval. Subjects seem to create and use associations between target information and environ-mental cues as well as between target and internal state for information recall. For example, a person who is in a sad mood during a learning / memorizing phase has a better chance recalling the memorized information when being in a similar mood. To my knowledge, language attrition studies have not investigated this phenomenon explicitly. However, investigations into bilingual speech production reported on the problem of cue loss. Ecke (1996) and Shanon (1991) pointed out that bilingual speakers face problems of word retrieval when they are subject to abrupt changes in context or environment. These unexpected changes can lead to the sudden blocking of retrieval cues. Also anxiety, nervousness, fatigue, and tiredness may negatively affect cue availability and word retrieval in bilingual speakers (Clyne, 1972; Ecke, 1996; Kenny, 1996).

Anecdotal reports are consistent with the notion of cue dependency. Individuals who acquired and used a regional dialect as a child and who later moved to another area where they acquired and used the standard or another variety, frequently become incapable of speaking in the dialect except when returning to the dialect area where appropriate external cues are available. The literature presents cases of speakers who use dialects or accents dependent on specific contexts and environments. Vilar Sánchez (1995), for example, described a bilingual child’s consistent use of various accents in different environments. Major (1993) reported the loss of English native speakers’ accents during years of immigration in Brazil and under the influence of a Brazilian variety of English. One of the subjects reportedly recovered her accent shortly after moving back to the U.S., a finding that suggests that the native accent was not permanently unavail-able and / or that relearning the L1’s phonology was rather effortless for the subject. Yagmur et al. (1999) pointed out that the Australian-Turkish immigrants of their study reported a marked decrease of L1 skills (especially lexical production) in Australia, but no or little difficulty in understanding and speaking Turkish when visiting Turkey every four to six years. Yukawa (1998) argued that the lexical and syntactic attrition





found in two Japanese children were mostly due to lexical retrieval failure and syntactic processing difficulty, and not to restructuring and loss since receptive skills remained widely intact and productive skills were regained quickly in the home country (cf. also Slobin et al., 1993). These findings suggest that what may appear forgotten language in a certain environment is, in large part, an access problem (Ammerlaan, 1996; Schmid, 2002; Tomiyama, 2000; Yukawa, 1998) due to the lack of appropriate contexts and retrieval cues. They imply that temporarily inaccessible structures may be recovered providing that the right cues become available.

Cue dependency is a particularly promising framework for future studies of language attrition, especially, those designed to ascertain the nature of language attri-tion formulated in question (1) at the outset of this paper. One may investigate, for example, whether or to what extent language skills are affected when immigrant speakers re-encounter the environment of their child / home language or when they remeet with the persons they interacted with as children in the (partially) forgotten language. It could be explored how effective environmental factors, such as places and persons, are as retrieval cues for receptive and productive access to seemingly forgotten language structures. The use of priming techniques could prove useful to create conditions that enhance cue availability and language recovery. Systematic comparative studies of attriters’ productive and receptive skills in situations deprived of retrieval cues versus situations with extensive retrieval cues would help illuminate the relevance of cues for language recovery and use.

4.7Language as a dynamic system

Dynamic systems are self-organizing systems that are characterized by complete connect-edness and mutual interaction of variables that affect each others’ change over time, they convert between stable and instable states and, through feedback, can lead to qualitative changes (Briggs & Peat, 1989). Systems theoreticians attempt to explain how systems of formal structure, such as language (or multilingualism), evolve and develop over time. In such a framework, the language system is seen to develop through the interaction of environmental constraints and general cognitive and perceptual mechanisms. Dynamic, interactionist, and connectionist approaches to language share the explicit critique of unitary, single state grammars and the inability of discrete symbol-based computations to adequately address the problem of time and change (cf. van Gelder & Port, 1995, also on differences between the related approaches). Researchers applied dynamic systems and interactionist approaches to address brain functioning and cognition (van Gelder & Port, 1995), aspects of language processing (Elman, 1995), the evolution of language (Cangelosi & Parisi, 2002), and problems of L1 and L2 acquisition (Ellis, 2002; Larsen-Freeman, 1997; MacWhinney, 1998). In a precursor model to systems theory, Bates, and MacWhinney (1981, 1987) suggested that functionalist interactive models could also be applied to language attrition. With the Dynamic Model of Multilingualism, Herdina and Jessner (2002) have begun to discuss the interrelatedness of variables, such as, language acquisition, language maintenance effort, metalinguistic awareness / language aptitude, and language loss in multilingual speakers. According to the authors, language attri-tion as a process of developmental change in the multilingual’s language proficiency is


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more consistent with a dynamic view of language and multilingualism than a view of language as a set of invariant single state grammars (also Jessner, 2003). The attrition of a language is normally related to the gradual acquisition and increasing strength of one or several competing languages. The two or more languages influence each other in the way they are learned, stored, and processed. An increase in L2 proficiency will often be correlated with a decrease in L1 proficiency (see Jia & Aaronson, 1999; McElree et al., 2000, Segalowitz, 1991). Environmental (including social) changes seem crucial forces behind linguistic competition and change.

The dynamic view of language may appeal for the interpretation of, in particular, child language attrition patterns that demonstrate dramatic changes in language compe-tence, dominance, and loss (cf. Berman & Olshtain, 1983; Isurin, 2000; Jia & Aaronson, 1999; Saville-Troike et al., 1995; Slobin et al., 1993). However, the rapid changes or shifts from one language (grammar) to another, as observed in young children may not neces-sarily present a challenge for advocates of discrete grammars. These dramatic cases of learning and forgetting might actually support the poverty of stimulus argument (Chomsky, 1975) and the critical (sensitive) period hypothesis. Likewise the language shifts could be explained as the resetting (and transfer) of parameters as part of UG (cf. Sharwood Smith & van Buren, 1991). Less dramatic, but continuous erosion of gram-mars, especially of once fully developed L1 in adults, would provide a stronger argument for a dynamic language system that is highly sensitive to environmental constraints and minimally based on discrete rules. Such evidence, however, is inconclusive to date since much of the attrition data appear to reflect problems of retrieval and processing. Several studies also suggest important limitations to variation, change, and loss, in particular, studies that found little or no attrition of core features of grammatical competence in the fully developed L1 of adult speakers (e.g., Ammerlaan, 1996; de Bot & Clyne, 1989; Schmid, 2002; Toribio, 2001; Yagmur et al., 1999) and studies that reported little or no attrition in highly proficient speakers of L2 (van Ginkel & van der Linden, 1996; Weltens et al., 1989). Thus, determining the degree to which the attrition of language structures is possible or impossible will remain a crucial issue and empirical testing ground for theories of language and cognition, including the dynamic systems approach.

Despite unsettled theoretical questions and methodological challenges that arise from the complexity of interacting factors in dynamic systems, it can be helpful to conceive language development holistically as the interplay of environmental, cognitive, social-affective, and linguistic variables. Such a view could also contribute to a more realistic understanding of what constitutes multilingual proficiency (cf. also Cook, 1992; Grosjean, 1989; Romaine, 1995), and the potential gains and losses of becoming a multilingual speaker.

5 Conclusion and Outlook

In the present article I neither provided an exhaustive review of psychological research and theories of forgetting, nor a complete overview of research into language attrition. My main objective was to point at problem areas of potential common interest to linguists and psychologists by illustrating important analogies that exist between psychological assumptions about forgetting and phenomena of language attrition and linguistic





studies and explanations thereof. To date, linguists have been skeptical about potential contributions of psychological theory and research to the study of language attrition. Likewise psychologists have paid little attention to linguists’ studies of language loss although some have begun to recognize the problem of language attrition, its interrela-tion with L2 acquisition and the need to study the dynamics of bi- and multilingualism. It is hoped that the present review and discussion will raise awareness for theory and research in both disciplines, and perhaps, provoke interdisciplinary collaboration. Although the paper did not focus on a discussion of research methodology, it may also foster some awareness of the range of methods used by linguists and psychologists to study the decline of language production, reception, and representations, so that future discussions of language attrition will incorporate findings from both naturalistic and experimental studies.

In this paper, language attrition studies were related to seven theories that address forgetting: repression / suppression, distortion, decay, interference, retrieval failure, cue dependency, and dynamic systems theory. An apparent problem of using these concep-tions as frameworks for language attrition studies lies in the difficulty to distinguish between the concepts. The borderlines between decay, retrieval failure, and cue depend-ency, for example, are fluid. In fact, the processes are likely to be interrelated. Decay can cause retrieval slowdown and failure, perhaps, the distortion and reorganization of retrieval routes, which in turn, can make processing more affected by interfer-ence. Despite such interrelatedness, I believe that the discussion of these concepts can contribute to a better understanding of language attrition. Insights from studies on repression / suppression can be of relevance for investigations into the social-psycho-logical factors that contribute to the forgetting of language. Distortion may provide some analogy for the modeling of restructuring and regularization patterns in bilingual speakers under attrition although it is probably the most problematic concept since it is difficult to grasp and to distinguish methodologically from other variables. Decay, interference, retrieval failure, and cue dependency are all important approaches for the study and explanation of general cognitive and perceptual mechanisms that contribute to the forgetting of language. Interactive and dynamic systems theories may help to develop a holistic and more realistic picture of the manifold variables, constraints and interactions that shape multilingual proficiency, language learning, maintenance, and loss. In these respects, the latter approach could also serve as a guide for language educators and planners.

Having framed the discussion around psychological conceptualizations of forget-ting, I by no means intended to suggest a replacement of linguistic thought, hypotheses and research on the functioning of language attrition. Without thorough linguistic analyses (contrastive, functional, typological, and universal) it will be impossible to determine what language structures are learned and forgotten. Why and how human beings learn and forget language can only be explored fully if language attrition remains the proper concern of applied linguists, psycholinguists, and sociolinguists alike.


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