Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

The attrition of German in two Turkish girls (seven and nine years old), previously resident in Germany, was observed in Turkey. The attrition was compared to the L2-acquisition of German of a Turkish boy aged 11. Attrition did not set in immediately. In the second stage, after six months, slower speech, hesitation and free morpheme code-switching to Turkish due to lexical attrition, particularly in verbs, indicated its onset. Basic grammatic al categories were involved in the third stage. Bound morpheme code- switching became the predominant pattern. Basic syntactic patterns of German were retained longest. Attrition was largely a mirror-image of acquisition. Simplification, overgeneralization and over-regularization were strikingly similar in both sets of data. Code-switching turned out to be developmentally systematic, and even 'grammaticalized' in the final stages.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Cohen, A. 1975: Forgetting a second language. Language Learning 25, 127-38.

- 1988: Attrition in the productive lexicon of two Portuguese Third Language Speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 11, 135-49.

De Bot, K. and Clyne, M. 1989: Language reversion revisited. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 11, 167-77.

Jakobson, R. 1968: Child language, aphasia and phonological universals . The Hague: Mouton.

Jordens, P. , de Bot, K. and Trapman, H. 1989: Linguistic aspects of regression in German case marking . Studies in Second Language Acquisition 11, 179-204.

Kuhberg, H. 1987: Der Erwerb der Temporalität des Deutschen durch zwei elfjährige Kinder mit den Ausgangs-sprachen Türkisch und Polnisch. Eine Longitudinal-untersuchung . Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang.

- 1988: The acquisition of German temporality by two eleven-vear-old children with Turkish and Polish as the first languages. A longitudinal study . Delaware Papers in Linguistics 1, 32-37.

Lambert, R. and Freed, B. , editors, 1982: The loss of language skills . Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Olshtain, E. 1989: Is second language attrition the reversal of second language acquisition? Studies in Second Language Acquisition 11, 151-65.

10.

Olshtain, E. and Blum-Kulka, S. 1990: Happy Hebrish: Mixing and switching in American-Israeli family interactions. In Gass, S. , Madden, C. , Preston, D. and Selinker, L. , editors, Variation in second language acquisition, Volume 1. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 59-83.

11.

Preston, D. 1982: How to lose a language. Interlanguage Studies Bulletin 6, 64-87.

12.

Seliger, H. and Vago, R. , editors, 1991: First language attrition . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

13.

Weltens, B. , de Bot, K. and Van Els, T. , editors, 1986: Language attrition in progess. Dordrecht: Foris.

14.

Weltens, B. and Cohen, A. 1989: Language attrition research. An introduction. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 11, 127-33.

Longitudinal L2-attrition versus L2-acquisition,in three Turkish children- empirical findings

Abstract

Get full access to this article

References