Language attrition, reduced redundancy, and creativity

Language attrition and reactivation in the context of bilingual first language acquisition

“…Seliger and Vago (1991) describe L1 attrition as disintegration of the structure of a first language in contact situations with a second language. Seliger (1991) argues that L1 attrition in the case of bilinguals is marked by an increased dominance of the majority language and lessened exposure to the L1. Seliger also uses the term unlearning, which is related to Montrul's (2008) definition of attrition as 'loss of a given property y of the language after property y was mastered with native-speaker level accuracy and remained stable for a while'.…”

Review article: Research on first language attrition of morphosyntax in adult bilinguals

“…Only certain L2 forms can trigger change in some L1 properties. For example, only relatively less complex L2 forms encroach on the L1 and accelerate change or attrition in the corresponding L1 properties (Andersen, 1982;Seliger, 1989;Schmid, 2002). The belief that less complex L2 features replace more complex L1 features is generally linked to a reduction or simplification rule in attrition (Andersen, 1982;Seliger, 1989;.…”

“…For example, only relatively less complex L2 forms encroach on the L1 and accelerate change or attrition in the corresponding L1 properties (Andersen, 1982;Seliger, 1989;Schmid, 2002). The belief that less complex L2 features replace more complex L1 features is generally linked to a reduction or simplification rule in attrition (Andersen, 1982;Seliger, 1989;. For example, in Seliger's (1989; 'redundancy reduction principle', reduction is associated with some form of 'markedness' in the sense that less marked L2 forms are more likely to replace more marked forms in the L1, whereas less marked L1 forms appear more resistant to attrition.…”

“…The belief that less complex L2 features replace more complex L1 features is generally linked to a reduction or simplification rule in attrition (Andersen, 1982;Seliger, 1989;. For example, in Seliger's (1989; 'redundancy reduction principle', reduction is associated with some form of 'markedness' in the sense that less marked L2 forms are more likely to replace more marked forms in the L1, whereas less marked L1 forms appear more resistant to attrition. In this account, grammatical forms that are more complex and have a narrow linguistic distribution are considered marked.…”

Second language acquisition and first language loss in adult early bilinguals: exploring some differences and similarities

“…On a different front, a tradition of experimental psycholinguistic research has investigated how bilinguals of different proficiency levels in the two languages access or retrieve lexical items, or process sentences on-line, and how the two linguistic systems prime or inhibit each other (Grosjean and Soares, 1986;Grosjean, 1994;de Groot, 1995;de Groot and Kroll, 1997;Nicol, 2001, Dussias, 2003among others). With the exception of work by Seliger (1991;, Sharwood Smith and van Buren (1991), Platzack (1996), Polinsky (1997), Sorace (2000a), Toribio (2001), Gürel (2002) and Montrul (2002), much remains to be done to understand the formal and linguistic nature of the attrition process in a bilingual context and how it affects the human language faculty. One major reason why this area of research has remained relatively underexplored until now is perhaps the lack of theoretical and methodological tools to investigate the phenomenon (for discussion, see Sharwood Smith and van Buren, 1991).…”