Some notes on the nature of L1-attrition and its modeling

Heritage language use in the country of residence matters for language maintenance, but short visits to the homeland can boost heritage language outcomes

“…In terms of operationalization of the different variables, in the present study, we took short-term visits to and from the country of origin to be an accumulation of input quantity and quality of the variety spoken in the country of origin over short periods of time in the last 4 years prior to testing. This investigation of short-term re-immersion to the home country is different from existing studies with adult returnees or short re-immersion where they tested participants before and immediately after re-immersion (Chamorro et al, 2016;Genevska-Hanke, 2017;Casado et al, 2023). Another related issue is that we did not examine how the onset of the visits might relate to the child's chronological age in line with what has been pursued in studies with returnees controlled for the timing of testing after re-immersion (e.g., incubation period; Flores, 2020;Kubota et al, 2020Kubota et al, , 2021.…”

“…However, given that the children in our study returned to their country of residence (US or Canada), where English is the dominant language, we can only hypothesize that any long-term benefits of these short-term visits gradually fade away. Although our study is the first to show that HL outcomes in heritage children are modulated by the length and frequency of these short-visits over time, more research is needed to fully understand the immediate and long-term effects of short-term visits on these vulnerable structures with child heritage speakers using designs similar to those found in studies with bilingual adults (Chamorro et al, 2016;Genevska-Hanke, 2017;Casado et al, 2023).…”

“…Evidence for heritage language reversal after re-immersion in the country of origin has been reported in two lines of bilingualism research. The first one relates to studies on first-generation bilingual adult speakers who are re-exposed to the heritage language through short-term visits (between 2 and 6 weeks per year) to the home country, either for study or for leisure (Chamorro et al, 2016;Genevska-Hanke, 2017;Gargiulo and van de Weijer, 2020;Casado et al, 2023). These studies have shown that the heritage language can be re-activated even after short re-immersion, leading to improved performance on structures that were vulnerable prior to re-immersion.…”

“…The second line of research comes from studies on returnee children and adults, namely heritage speakers who returned from the country of residence to the country of origin as children and adolescents (Flores et al, 2017(Flores et al, , 2022Flores, 2019;Kubota et al, 2020Kubota et al, , 2021 or as adults (Genevska-Hanke, 2017;Köpke and Genevska-Hanke, 2018). This line of research examines whether heritage language reversal is possible after re-immersion to the country of origin and how long it takes (Flores and Snape, 2021;Montrul, 2023).…”

“…The finding that frequent, short-term visits to the home country give rise to improved performance on lexical and syntactic domains is in line with two emerging areas of bilingualism research. Adult studies that examine how even short re-immersion in the home country can reverse (temporary) attrition effects (Chamorro et al, 2016;Genevska-Hanke, 2017;Casado et al, 2023), and studies with child and adult returnees (Köpke and Genevska-Hanke, 2018;Kubota et al, 2020;Flores and Snape, 2021) that show that long-term immersion can trigger heritage language reversal. In our study, we found that expressive vocabulary and the vulnerable interface condition (WF) benefited more by naturalistic exposure to an input where VS is highly frequent.…”