The role of length of residency in first language grammatical attrition

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

be susceptible to attrition if a) the corresponding property in the L2 input can be processed with sufficient success to be fully acquired in the L2, and b) the property shares enough similarity in the L1 and L2 for the L2 property to be incorporated into the L1 grammar. This predicts that attrition principally occurs "for aspects of the L1 grammar which share featural properties to a significant degree, but where differences nevertheless obtain" (Hicks and Dominguez, 2019:160). While this prediction appears to be supported by the existing literature, the only property which has been extensively investigated is pronouns, and to date very little is known about other grammatical features (Schmid, 2020). While the AvA model claims that grammatical attrition is dependent upon 'extensive' input from an L2 (Hicks and Dominguez, 2019:154), it makes no specific prediction about the role length of residency plays in L1 grammatical attrition. Schmid (2019:291) has recently argued that the role played by length of residency in the context of attrition has long been under investigated and that there is extremely little evidence on how attrition might progress during the first years following migration. This is because most attrition studies to date have focused on participants with a substantial length of residency in the L2- speaking country (e.g. a minimum residency length of 10 years in Cuza, 2010; 15 years in Dominguez and Hicks, 2016). My study addresses these two significant empirical gaps identified in the L1 attrition literature; testing grammatical properties which have previously received little or no attention, and pinpointing the duration of L2 exposure necessary to engender grammatical attrition. I will test for grammatical attrition among native Spanish speakers who have emigrated to Portugal after childhood: Iverson (2012) has shown the L1-Spanish/L2-Portuguese language combination to be favourable to grammatical attrition in a case study of an attriting Chilean-Spanish speaker living in Brazil for 30 years. My study will recruit groups of participants living in Portugal for varying lengths of time, paying particular attention to the first few years following migration. The participants will undertake experimental language production and comprehension tasks designed to reveal their L1 knowledge of a set of specifically selected grammatical properties exhibiting differences between Spanish and Portuguese. Quantitative analysis will compare their results to those of monolingual Spanish controls in Spain to determine if L1 grammatical attrition has in fact occurred, at what length of exposure to the L2, and for which grammatical properties. Providing important new data focusing on significant gaps in our understanding of L1 grammatical attrition, this research will demonstrably benefit the academic community in language acquisition and linguistic theory, as new understanding of the nature of attrition will advance our understanding of the cognitive architecture of the human language faculty itself (Hicks and Dominguez, 2019; 2020).