Early Detection of English Attrition in Korean-English Bilingual Children

Abstract

This longitudinal case study utilized a body-part picture-naming task (Hawaii Assessment of Language Access project) to assess the changing proficiencies and dominance of Korean and English from two Korean sisters who returned back to Korea after living in Honolulu, Hawaii for two years. The task consisted of two strata based on the frequency of body-part vocabularies: high-frequency and low-frequency items. Children's accuracy and response time were gauged to demonstrate the participants' relative proficiency in English and Korean over three sessions starting from 18 months after their return until the 25th month after return. Since infrequent language use limits accessibility to that language, which in turn eventually causes further language loss(O'Grady et al., 2009), less frequently used words would be more vulnerable to proficiency change than high-frequency words. The result of this study suggests that lexical accessibility is one of the earliest linguistic aspects influenced by attrition, which can show up as early as around 21 months after their return to Korea.