Language Attrition

An introduction to language attrition, providing an overview of linguistic and extralinguistic features involved and a description of research methods.

1. Introduction; Part I. Linguistic Aspects of Language Attrition: 2. What is attrition?; 3. Cross-linguistic influence and the mental lexicon; 4. Attrition in the mental lexicon; 5. Attrition and the structure of language; Part II. Extralinguistic Aspects of Language Attrition: 6. Personal background factors; 7. The role of L1 input and output; 8. Attitudes and identities; Part III. Conducting Research on Language Attrition Preliminary Considerations: 9. The test populations: participant characteristics and acquisition; 10. Types of linguistic knowledge; Part IV. Experimental Designs for Attrition Research The Language Attrition Test Battery: 11. Lexical tasks; 12. Grammaticality judgment tasks; 13. Other grammatical tasks; 14. Free speech; Part V. Coding and Analysing the Data: 15. Transcribing and coding free speech: the CHILDES project; 16. Coding and reporting experimental data; 17. Interpreting your data: inferential statistics; 18. Conclusion.