First Language Attrition and Dominance: Same Same or Different?

Abstract

We explore the relationship between first language attrition and language dominance, defined here as the relative availability of each of a bilingual’s languages with respect to language processing. We assume that both processes might represent two stages of one and the same phenomenon (Schmid and Köpke, 2017; Köpke, 2018). While many researchers agree that language dominance changes repeatedly over the lifespan (e.g., Silva-Corvalan and Treffers-Daller, 2015), little is known about the precise time scales involved in dominance shifts and attrition. We investigate these time scales in a longitudinal case study of pronominal subject production by a near-native L2-German (semi-null subject and topic-drop but non-pro-drop) and L1-Bulgarian (pro-drop) bilingual speaker with 17 years of residence in Germany. This speaker’s spontaneous speech showed a significantly higher rate of overt pronominal subjects in her L1 than the controls’ rates when tested in Germany. After 3 weeks of L1-reexposure in Bulgaria, however, attrition effects disappeared and the overt subject rate fell within the monolinguals’ range (Genevska-Hanke, 2017). The findings of this first investigation are now compared to those of a second investigation 5 years later, involving data collection in both countries with the result that after 17 years of immigration, no further attrition was attested and the production of overt subjects remained monolingual-like for the data collections in both language environments. The discussion focuses on the factors that are likely to explain these results. First, these show that attrition and language dominance are highly dependent on immediate language use context and change rapidly when the language environment is modified. Additionally, the data obtained after L1-reexposure illustrate that time scales involved in dominance shift or attrition are much shorter than previously thought. Second, the role of age of acquisition in attrition has repeatedly been acknowledged. The present study demonstrates that attrition of a highly entrenched L1 is a phenomenon affecting language processing only temporarily and that it is likely to regress quickly after reexposure or return to balanced L1-use. The discussion suggests that dominance shift and attrition probably involve similar mechanisms and are influenced by the same external factors, showing that both may be different steps of the same process.

Longitudinal Evidence for Simultaneous Bilingual Language Development With Shifting Language Dominance, and How to Explain It

“…Finally, for the blocked‐cyclic naming task, pre‐experiment familiarization provided an opportunity to reestablish the pictures’ names in the target language, which is conservative with respect to our claims of a shift in language dominance. That is, although some have suggested that speakers can easily overcome the effects of language attrition (e.g., Köpke & Genevska‐Hanke, 2018)—via processes that experimental psychologists might identify with repetition priming (Scarborough, Cortese, & Scarborough, 1977) and error‐proportional incremental learning (Oppenheim et al., 2010)—any resulting attenuation of L1 attrition would both make it more difficult detecting a change in dominance and be insufficient to explain children's continued L1 improvement in both tasks and all measures.…”

“…One underappreciated consequence of this error‐proportionality is that, although the network's connections reflect the cumulative effects of all its previous experience—and can thus account for basic frequency effects as well as “weaker links”‐related phenomena (Gollan, Montoya, Cera, & Sandoval, 2008)—they disproportionately reflect its most recent experience. It can therefore account for both relatively rapid shifts in language dominance and attenuation of L1 attrition upon re‐immersion in an L1 environment (Köpke & Genevska‐Hanke, 2018), as well as the particular importance of bilinguals’ current language use in predicting their relative abilities (Bedore et al., 2012; Unsworth, 2013). Thus, switching entirely to a L2 may lead to the gradual loss of a L1, but occasionally interleaving episodes of L1 use may be sufficient to not only undo the damage but even reverse it (cf.…”

The Croatian adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives*

“…Measuring and controlling for language dominance is crucial in research, but also holds psychological and societal importance because of its connections with language attrition and language loss (for an overview, see Köpke and Genevska-Hanke 2018). This project aimed to (1) measure language dominance in bilingual speakers of Italian and Croatian who were perceived as balanced, and (2) identify psychological and sociological factors relevant for determining language dominance.…”

On attrition, spaceships and viruses

“…Our understanding of the conditions under which changes effected by language attrition may be reversed, to date, is extremely limited for practical reasons, even though it has long been one of the more tantalizing questions in the field. However, a study by Genevska-Hanke revealed that the proportion of overt pronominal subjects realized in the first-language (L1) Bulgarian of a Bulgarian–German bilingual with 17 years of residence in Germany, having been significantly higher than that of monolingual Bulgarian controls, not only dropped back to native levels after a 3-week stay in Bulgaria (Genevska-Hanke, 2017) but also remained at those levels during a further 5 years of immersion in Germany (Köpke and Genevska-Hanke, 2018). Findings such as this do somewhat undermine the assumption that the settings and feature bundles of the native language can be modified by the same mechanisms as are used for grammar building, and throw up the question of whether the model needs to make some kind of further provision for a trace or underlying ‘phantom’ grammar, maintaining the original representation and allowing the speaker to revert to it with far less input-to-intake events than needed to modify it in the first place.…”