Introduction to Extralinguistic Factors in Language Attrition

Abstract

One of the most puzzling explanatory challenges to language attrition research is to identify the circumstances and predictors under which any particular speaker is likely to experience more or less attrition phenomena: it is a well-established finding that speakers who use more than one language in their daily lives develop increased variability concerning their first language (L1) skills across the full range of the linguistic repertoire, from phonetics through the lexicon and morphosyntax to pragmatics and beyond. However, the search for predictive factors—those features of an individual’s personal background, language habits and experience, and attitudes and motivation which may contribute to making someone a good vs. a poor L1 maintainer—has, to date, been largely inconclusive. This chapter provides a brief overview of the available research and sketches some open questions, before introducing the contributions to the present section.

The relationship between perception and production of illusory vowels in a second language

“…It is possible that their perception and production have become more lenient toward Korean than native English speakers who never left their home countries. There is ample evidence that experience with an L2 can affect many features of the L1 at both segmental and suprasegmental levels (for a review, see Schmid and Köpke, 2019). Chang (2012), for example, found that even with brief experience in L2 (the first weeks of elementary Korean studies), English learners of Korean produced the VOT of their L1 voiceless stops as drifted toward the longer VOT norms of a similar L2 stop (i.e.…”

More insights into the interaction between age, exposure, and attitudes in language attrition and retention from the perspective of bilingual returnees

“…Understanding the nature of this process requires looking in more detail at the predictors of language attrition. However, as pointed out by Schmid and Cherciov (2019), attrition studies face the methodological challenge of reduced population size, high variability of the collected data and an enormous difficulty in quantifying extralinguistic variables. This also applies to studies on returnee bilinguals, whose population is even more reduced than the populations who live in the migration context.…”

First Language Attrition: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What It Can Be

“…Even more than a common theoretical framework, attrition research requires a methodological boost. The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition ( Schmid et al, 2019 ) recently dedicated several chapters to neuroimaging approaches ( Rossi et al, 2019 ; Steinhauer and Kasparian, 2019 ). While providing a thorough overview of existing studies in the field, these chapters reiterate the need for more research that would provide better conceptualization of this phenomenon.…”