Foreign language attrition

First language attrition.

Speakers who live in an L2 environment for an extended period of time often experience change in the way in which they use their L1, a process referred to as L1 attrition. This article provides an overview of language attrition phenomena at various linguistic levels. However, attrition cannot be trivially or linearly related to factors such as the frequency of use of the L1. It is argued here t...

Georgia’s Rural Foreign Language Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy and How It Relates to Teacher Attrition

Foreign language teachers are in critical need in many parts of rural America. Using Bandura’s conceptual framework of self-efficacy teaching languages as a theoretical lens, the researchers created a scale to measure foreign language teacher efficacy and administered alongside a well-known efficacy survey to in-service rural teachers (N = 167) in Georgia. Data analysis indicates that the new i...

Perceived foreign accent in first language attrition and second language acquisition: The impact of age of acquisition and bilingualism

This study investigates constraints on ultimate attainment in second language (L2) pronunciation in a direct comparison of perceived foreign accent of 40 late L2 learners and 40 late first language (L1) attriters of German. Both groups were compared with 20 predominantly monolingual controls. Contrasting participants who acquired the target language from birth (monolinguals, L1 attriters) with ...

Lexical first language attrition Title : Lexical access and lexical diversity in first language attrition *

This paper presents an investigation of lexical first language (L1) attrition, assessing in what way a decrease in lexical accessibility manifests itself for long-term residents in a second language (L2) environment. We question the measures typically used in attrition studies (formal tasks and type-token ratios) and argue for an in-depth analysis of free spoken data, including factors such as ...

Dutch in Indonesia: Language Attrition or Language Contact?