Cixiu Duan
I found an interesting phenomenon that some bilingual and multilingual speakers may experience the process of losing their first language or have the difficulty to recall certain words or grammatical rules (which is called first language attrition). Take my husband for instance, after living in the U.S. for about ten years, when he talks about finance-related topic, he unintentionally uses English rather than Mandarin. As far as I know, after reading several articles, many factors may have impact on the process of first language attrition, including the attitude (Cherciov, 2013), amount of contact and time elapsed (de Bot, Gommans & Rossing, 1991), the age when the bilingual is exposed to a L2 (Ahn, Chang, DeKeyser & Lee-Ellis, 2017), amount of exposure to the native language (Dragoy, Virfel, Yurchenko & Bastiaanse, 2017), and gender (Ellis, 1994). However, I haven’t found much information about the role of cross-linguistic influence in the process of language attrition. Let me explain it.
Continue reading “What’s the role of cross-linguistic influence in the process of first language attrition?”