This chapter reviews the literature on psycholinguistic aspects of language attrition over the past half decade. Descriptive data-based studies have continued to dominate during this time, providing needed groundwork for the emerging discipline. A few studies have continued theoretical threads from previous work, however, by examining attrition data from the perspectives of the regression hypothesis and markedness theory. We have also seen the beginnings of promising new lines of research which draw theoretical underpinnings from neighboring disciplines, most notably from the savings paradigm in cognitive psychology and from theories of codeswitching in bilingualism studies. Evidence on the effects in attrition of non-linguistic variables such as age, proficiency level, and literacy has continued to accumulate. Hesitation phenomena in attriter speech have begun to receive serious attention. Relearning, one of the main areas to potentially benefit from language attrition studies, is also gaining new research impetus at the turn of the century.

This study analyzes the relationship between field sensitivity and cloze test performance for 286 subjects between the ages of 15 and 19 in six Pacific island cultures. Hawaiian students were found to be significantly more field independent than Samoan, Tongan, Fijian, Indian-Fijian, and Tahitian students. In the South Pacific samples, males were significantly more field independent than females, whereas in Hawaii there was no statistically significant relationship between sex and cognitive style. When the sample was taken as a whole, a significant relationship was found between field dependence/independence and cloze scores. Sizable group differences for subgroups within the sample, however, indicate that the relationship may not be significant for all cultures. Within cultures, the subgroups having lower scholastic achievement showed a significant relationship between cognitive style and cloze test score, while the high achievers did not.

This article extends the line of research that has recently applied the savings paradigm from cognitive psychology to vocabulary relearning. Second language (L2) data from 304 returnees from Japan and Korea provide evidence of the strongest savings effect yet reported in studies of lexical reactivation. The extent of the savings advantage appears to decline over time (with age a confounding factor) and relates significantly to current vocabulary size. No significant gender effects in savings are evident, but unexpected differences between the L2 Japanese and L2 Korean subgroups are reported in both lexical maintenance and savings accessibility. Substantial Matthew effects in both data sets help elucidate sources of individual differences in vocabulary learning and relearning.

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In the search for universals of relative clause acquisition, the present research investigated the comprehension of six types of Hindi-Urdu correlative sentences by child and adult LI and L2 learners. Group comparisons show a sharper distinction between the performance of the first and second language learners than between the children and adults. While the native speakers tend to pay attention to case markers in interpreting sentences, the English-speaking learners tend to ignore these morphological cues, relying rather on a word order heuristic. The LI errors, particularly those of the adults, are more systematic than the L2. Many of the learners do not appear to have any functional strategy for discovering the missing noun complement in the Hindi-Urdu correlative clauses and instead resort to random guessing. The paper concludes that language universals are available for the processing of complex structures only once a certain level of proficiency has been attained.The existence of universal processes that underlie language development has been widely accepted by researchers in first language acquisition (Brown 1973). The assumption is that in the languages of the world the possible grammars are limited by an innately determined set of schemata that result from the biological composition of the human mind. As part of a child's genetic endowment, these schemata make available a predetermined set of principles that restrict the nature of hypotheses made about the organization of a language.In second language acquisition research over the past decade, the role of universals in acquisition has also been an area of central interest. Some researchers argue that there is no reason to assume that universal schemata and principles operate any differently in the learning of a second language than they do in the first (Dulay and Burt 1975). First language influence in L2 learning is claimed to be minimal, or even nonexistent. At the same time, the learning strategies of the second language learner are seen as being guided by universal principles common to all learners regardless of first language background. This position has gained some credence as a result of several studies that report little L1 interference in the speech and comprehension of 143