LING212- SLA

Language loss

Florencia Franceschina

Attrition
Temporary or permanent loss of language
ability as reflected in a speakers 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.
2.
3.
4.
5.

SLA
Bilingualism
Precursor stage for L1 attrition
L1 attrition
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 individuals 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 attrition
Pallier, 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 attrition
De 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.