First Language Attrition: The Effects of Acculturation to the Host Culture

Abstract

Abstract Language attrition studies have mainly focused on second language (L2) attrition ( Bardovi-Harlig and Stringer, 2011 , Gardner et al., 1987 ). It is only in the last three decades that attention has been paid to L1 attrition and this area of applied linguistics is now aiming at establishing a sound theoretical and developmental framework. Globalization and the massive transnational migrations of the last decade have raised awareness on the fragility of what is taken as our linguistic solid ground: our L1. However, most studies so far have focused either on specific grammatical performative differences between attriters and control groups or on the codeswitching habits among migrant populations ( Dussias, 2004 , Major and Baptista, 2007 ). In contrast, the present study offers a sociolinguistic perspective by which the participantś level of acculturation to the host culture is taken into account when analyzing the performance of 20 English L1 attriters living in Catalonia against a mirror control group in England. Participants, all university-level educated English speakers who have lived in Spain for at least 8 years, were administered a sociolinguistic questionnaire to measure their level of exposure to their L1 as well as their attitude towards their L1 and the L2. Also, they were administered three language tests: the first test consisted of a free speech story-telling test to analyze differences in discourse (lexical richness, syntactic complexity, hesitation patterns and code switching), the second test measured their lexical retrieval rate (implicit knowledge) and finally, the third test looked into lexical retrieval of specific words in specific contexts (explicit knowledge). The results are measured in terms of correlation analysis (using CLAN and SPSS) between the results of the linguistic tests and the participantś sociolinguistic habits. In turn, the latter are compared to the results of the control group in order to identify which acculturation phenomena have greater influence over L1 attrition.