LING212- SLALanguage loss

Florencia Franceschina

Attrition

“Temporary or permanent loss of language ability as reflected in a speaker’s performance or in his or her inability to make grammaticality judgements that would be consistent with NS monolinguals at the same age and stage of language development”

Seliger (1996: 606)

What is attrited language like?

More parsimonius, less redundant Can lead to the creation of creoles

The process of language loss

1. SLA

2. Bilingualism

3. Precursor stage for L1 attrition

4. L1 attrition

5. Language death

Is the development of language attrition any different from that of first language acquisition?

Yes, in the sense that it is not a deterministic process (but SLA is not deterministic either). It is not an automatic consequence of acquiring an L2.

How can attrition manifest itself?

Competence loss Performance loss

Examples- Dysfluency- Inability to pronounce the L1 with a NS accent- Production of morphosyntax that is not acceptable as

grammatical to monolingual NSs- Inability to make grammaticality judgements like those of

monolingual NSs

L1 vs L2 attrition

Qualitative differences Knowledge appears to be stored and retrieved

differently in the L1 and the L2

Methodological issues

It can be very difficult to investigate attrition due to problems such as:– Lack of knowledge about individual’s level of

knowledge before attrition began– Even when proficiency measures exist, it is hard to

determine the nature of that knowledge (rote learned, automatized, etc.)

– Non-existence of detailed baseline information about stages of L2 development

Code-mixing

There is a qualitative change in the use of code-mixed utterances once the attrition process begins mainly consisting of:

– the nonobservance of language-specific constraints of the borrowing language

– Nonobservance of context or topic constraints

Age differences

Compare the case of immigrant children and immigrant adults.

Semilingualism

Outcome of incomplete SLA and incomplete L1 loss that means that the speaker is not completely nativelike in either the L1 or L2.

Residue

Is there any advantage in having had a language that was lost for the relearning of this language?

There is no clear answer to this question at present.

What are the underlying causes of language attrition?

Online retrieval problems? Loss of linguistic knowledge? Both?

Reading

Seliger, Herbert W. 1996. Primary language attrition in the context of bilingualism. In Handbook of second language acquisition, eds. William C Ritchie and Tej K Bhatia. San Diego: Academic Press. Pp. 605-626.

References

L1 attritionPallier, C., Dehaene, S., Poline, J. B., LeBihan, D., Argenti, A.-M., Dupoux, E.,

and Mehler, J. 2003: Brain imaging of language plasticity in adopted adults: can a second language replace the first? Cerebral Cortex Feb 2003, 13: 155-161.

Seliger, H. W., and Vago, R. M. eds. 1991: First language attrition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schmid, M. S., Kopke, B., Keijzer, M., and Weilemar, L. eds. 2004: First language attrition: interdisciplinary perspectives on methodological issues. Studies in Bilingualism 28. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

L2 attritionDe Bot, K., and Weltens, B. 1995: Foreign language attrition. Annual Review

of Applied Linguistics 15: 151-164.De Bot, K., and Hulsen, M. 2002: Language attrition: tests, self-assessments

and perception. In Portraits of the L2 user, ed. V. J. Cook. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Pp. 251-276.