L1 Attrition vis-à-vis L2 Acquisition

Lexicon, Syntax-Pragmatics Interface, and Prosody in L1-English L2-Italian Late Bilinguals

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5900067
AutoresMattia Zingaretti (0000-0002-5565-2538), Vasiliki Chondrogianni (0000-0002-8580-5662), D Robert Ladd, Antonella Sorace (0000-0002-8812-1979)
Ano2025
Volume10
Fascículo9
Páginas224
Data de publicação2025-09-04
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoLanguages (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X
EditoraMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/languages10090224
OpenAlexW4413991253
IdiomaFR
Citações recebidas4
Referências citadas85

Late bilingual speakers immersed in a second language (L2) environment often experience the non-pathological attrition of their first language (L1), exhibiting selective and reversible changes in L1 processing and production. While attrition research has largely focused on long-term residents in anglophone countries, examining changes primarily within a single L1 domain, the present study employs a novel experimental design to investigate L1 attrition, alongside L2 acquisition, across three domains (i.e., the lexicon, syntax-pragmatics interface, and prosody) in two groups of L1-English L2-Italian late bilinguals: long-term residents in Italy vs. university students in the UK. A total of 112 participants completed online tasks assessing lexical retrieval, anaphora resolution, and sentence stress patterns in both languages. First, both bilingual groups showed comparable levels of semantic interference in lexical retrieval. Second, at the syntax-pragmatics interface, only residents in Italy showed signs of L1 attrition in real-time processing of anaphora, while resolution preferences were similar between groups; in the L2, both bilingual groups demonstrated target-like preferences, despite some slowdown in processing. Third, while both groups showed some evidence of target-like L2 prosody, with residents in Italy matching L1-Italian sentence stress patterns closely, prosodic attrition was only reported for residents in Italy in exploratory analyses. Overall, this study supports the notion of L1 attrition as a natural consequence of bilingualism-one that is domain- and experience-dependent, unfolds along a continuum, and involves a complex (and possibly inverse) relationship between L1 and L2 performance that warrants further investigation

Attrition · Lexicon · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Pragmatics · Prosody · Second-language acquisition · Syntax · Computer Science · Language Development and Disorders · Medicine · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Philosophy