Language Attrition - Attrition and Frequency of Use

Attrition and Frequency of Use

One of the basic predictions of psycholinguistic research with respect to L1 attrition is that language loss can be attributed to language disuse (e.g. Paradis, 2007 ; Köpke, 2007 ). According to this prediction, attrition will be most radical among those individuals who rarely or never speak their L1 in daily life, while those speakers who use the L1 regularly, for example within their family or with friends, will to some degree be protected against its deterioration. This assumption is based on the simple fact that rehearsal of information can maintain accessibility. The amount of use which a potential attriter makes of her L1 strikes most researchers intuitively as one of the most important factors in determining the attritional process (e.g. Cook, 2005 ; Paradis, 2007 ). Obler (1993) believes that less-frequently used items are more difficult to retrieve. The speed of retrieving a correct form or the actual production of an incorrect form is not indicative of loss but may be retrieval failure instead. In other words, what appears to be lost is in fact difficult to retrieve.

There is, however, little direct evidence that the degree to which a language system will attrite is dependent on the amount to which the language is being used in everyday life. Two early studies report that those subjects who used their L1 on an extremely infrequent basis showed more attrition over time ( de Bot, Gommans & Rossing, 1991 and Köpke, 1999 ). On the other hand, there is also some evidence for a negative correlation, suggesting that the attriters who used their L1 on a daily basis actually performed worse on some tasks (Jaspaert & Kroon 1989).

However, more recent, larger-scale studies of attrition which attempt to systematically elicit information on language use in a large range of settings have failed to discover any strong links between frequency of L1 use and degree of L1 attrition ( Schmid, 2007 ; Schmid & Dusseldorp, 2010 .)