The role of length of residency in first language grammatical attrition

居住时间长短对母语语法损耗的影响

• 批准号: 2890794
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Southampton
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2890794
• 关键词: role; length; residency; first; language

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).

如果 a) L2 输入中的相应属性可以足够成功地处理以在 L2 中完全获取，并且 b) 该属性在 L1 和 L2 中具有足够的相似性，以便将 L2 属性合并到 L1 语法中，则容易受到磨损。这预测磨损主要发生在“L1 语法的某些方面，这些方面在很大程度上共享特征，但仍然存在差异”（Hicks 和 Dominguez，2019：160）。虽然这一预测似乎得到了现有文献的支持，但唯一被广泛研究的属性是代词，迄今为止，人们对其他语法特征知之甚少（Schmid，2020）。虽然 AvA 模型声称语法损耗取决于来自 L2 的“广泛”输入（Hicks 和 Dominguez，2019：154），但它没有对居住长度在 L1 语法损耗中所起的作用做出具体预测。 Schmid (2019:291) 最近认为，长期以来，居住时间在自然减员中所起的作用一直在研究中，而且很少有证据表明在移民后的头几年内自然减员可能会如何发展。这是因为迄今为止大多数减员研究都集中在在第二语言国家居住较长时间的参与者（例如，2010 年库萨的最短居住时间为 10 年；2016 年多明格斯和希克斯的最短居住时间为 15 年）。我的研究解决了 L1 流失文献中发现的两个重大经验差距；测试以前很少或根本没有受到关注的语法属性，并确定产生语法损耗所需的第二语言暴露的持续时间。我将测试童年后移民到葡萄牙的以西班牙语为母语的人的语法损耗：艾弗森（Iverson，2012）在对一位在巴西生活了 30 年的智利裔西班牙语使用者的案例研究中表明，L1-西班牙语/L2-葡萄牙语组合有利于语法损耗。我的研究将招募在葡萄牙居住不同时间长度的参与者群体，特别关注移民后的最初几年。参与者将承担实验性语言生成和理解任务，旨在揭示他们对一组专门选择的语法属性的母语知识，这些语法属性表现出西班牙语和葡萄牙语之间的差异。定量分析将他们的结果与西班牙单语西班牙语对照的结果进行比较，以确定第一语言语法磨损是否确实发生、接触第二语言的时间长短以及哪些语法属性。这项研究提供了重要的新数据，重点关注我们对 L1 语法损耗理解中的重大差距，这将明显有利于语言习得和语言理论的学术界，因为对损耗本质的新理解将增进我们对人类语言能力本身认知结构的理解（Hicks 和 Dominguez，2019；2020）。