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

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.

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