You win some, you lose some: Comprehension and event-related potential evidence for L1 attrition

Abstract

We examine first language (L1) attrition among 30 L1 Spanish – L2 English speakers living in the United Kingdom. We also tested 30 recently-arrived Spaniards to the UK as a baseline. We present several key findings: 1) attrition fluctuates over time and does not affect all individuals equally; 2) entropy can explain said fluctuation of attritional affects over time such that while length of residence and age of arrival may affect the depth of attrition, how often one is exposed to her native language, how often she uses it and for how long each day, who her friends are, and to which types of input she is regularly exposed, seemingly aid in the maintenance or loss of linguistic knowledge; 3) though offline scalar interpretations among bilinguals were predicted by canonical sociolinguistic variables, the online data revealed an overall insensitivity to pragmatic violations. Thus, offline and online methods combine to be more explanatory regarding the comprehension and processing of implicature generating quantifiers.

Attriters and Bilinguals: What’s in a Name?

“…Findings from extant L1 attrition research also seem to reinforce the notion of "heterogeneous outcomes of heterogeneous bilingual experiences." For example, increasing length of immersion, L2 exposure, and L2 proficiency has been shown to modulate L1 ERP responses among bilingual "L1 attriters" themselves (e.g., Kasparian and Steinhauer, 2017a;Miller and Rothman, 2020). This is in line with recent findings demonstrating that variations in the aforementioned bilingual experiential factors have a discernible impact on the linguistic neurobiology, neurocognition, and behavior of the bilinguals (e.g., Gullifer et al, 2018;DeLuca et al, 2019;Gallo et al, 2021;Sulpizio et al, 2020).…”

“…We further encouraged researchers to view attriters as a group within the bilingual spectrum and sought a better understanding of how distinct they may be, if at all. Further neurocognitive and behavioral comparisons between attriting and non-attriting bilinguals (e.g., Major, 2010;Schmid, 2014;Miller and Rothman, 2020) are needed to continue unveiling what L1 attrition really is and determine whether there are indeed linguistic behaviors and associated neurocognitive processes that are distinct and separable enough from the range of crosslinguistic bilingual effects to be characterized as L1 attrition. Findings from extant L1 attrition research also seem to reinforce the notion of "heterogeneous outcomes of heterogeneous bilingual experiences."…”

Understanding bilingual brain function and structure changes? U bet! A unified bilingual experience trajectory model

“…In terms of neurocognitive adaptation, more balanced relative proficiency should lead to increased efficiency of language control (Stocco et al, 2014;Yamasaki et al, 2018), but this is likely dependent on several of the other experience-based factors (see section 2.3) (Beatty-Martínez et al, 2019;Grundy et al, 2017;Gullifer et al, 2018). While fully balanced relative proficiency is rare, a minimum threshold should likely be met for both maintenance of the linguistic representations and control demands to be continuously necessitated (Iverson & Miller, 2017;Miller & Rothman, 2019).…”

Modeling Heritage Language Phonetics and Phonology: Toward an Integrated Multilingual Sound System

“…This kind of imposition of structure (cf Natvig 2019;van Coetsem 1988), would result in active phonological behavior involving aspiration and not voicing, a clear difference from the Spanish phonological system and its processes. Production patterns that align with these representations encourage additional methods to investigate whether the Spanish GT dimension is present or merely not accessed in speech (see related discussion in (Miller and Rothman 2020)).…”