Hostname: page-component-669899f699-swprf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-25T16:46:26.328Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

You win some, you lose some: Comprehension and event-related potential evidence for L1 attrition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2019

David Miller Open the ORCID record for David Miller [Opens in a new window]  and
Jason Rothman
David Miller*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Chicago
Jason Rothman
Affiliation:
UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Universidad Nebrija
*
Address for correspondence: David Miller, E-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We examine first language (L1) attrition among 30 L1 Spanish – L2 English speakers living in the United Kingdom. We also tested 30 recently-arrived Spaniards to the UK as a baseline. We present several key findings: 1) attrition fluctuates over time and does not affect all individuals equally; 2) entropy can explain said fluctuation of attritional affects over time such that while length of residence and age of arrival may affect the depth of attrition, how often one is exposed to her native language, how often she uses it and for how long each day, who her friends are, and to which types of input she is regularly exposed, seemingly aid in the maintenance or loss of linguistic knowledge; 3) though offline scalar interpretations among bilinguals were predicted by canonical sociolinguistic variables, the online data revealed an overall insensitivity to pragmatic violations. Thus, offline and online methods combine to be more explanatory regarding the comprehension and processing of implicature generating quantifiers.

Keywords

language attritionscalar implicaturessemantic-pragmaticsevent-related potentials
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 23 , Special Issue 4: Interpreting: A window into bilingual processing , August 2020 , pp. 869 - 883
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Adelman, C (2005). Moving into Town--and Moving On: The Community College in the Lives of Traditional-Age Students. US Department of Education.Google Scholar
Alonso-Ovalle, L, & Menéndez-Benito, P (2002). Two types of weak quantifiers: Evidence from Spanish. Proceedings of the 1st North American Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, 11–19.Google Scholar
Alonso-Ovalle, L and Menéndez-Benito, P (2010). Modal indefinites. Natural Language Semantics 18, 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alonso-Ovalle, L and Menéndez-Benito, P (2012). Indefinites, dependent plurality, and the viability requirement on scalar alternatives. Journal of Semantics 30, 65–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, M and Jiang, J (2018). Teens, social media & technology 2018. Pew Research Center 31, 2018.Google Scholar
Barbet, C and Thierry, G (2016). Some alternatives? Event-related potential investigation of literal and pragmatic interpretations of some presented in isolation. Frontiers in Psychology 7(SEP). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01479CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bergmann, C, Meulman, N, Stowe, LA, Sprenger, SA and Schmid, MS (2015). Prolonged L2 immersion engenders little change in morphosyntactic processing of bilingual natives. Neuroreport 26, 1065–1070.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bialystok, E (1988). Levels of bilingualism and levels of linguistic awareness. Developmental psychology 24, 560.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bott, L and Noveck, IA (2004). Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language 51, 437–457. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2004.05.006CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callen, HB (1998). Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics.Google Scholar
Carston, R (1990). Quantity maxims and generalised implicature. (No. 2).Google Scholar
Chemla, E and Singh, R (2014). Remarks on the experimental turn in the study of scalar implicature, Part I. Language and Linguistics Compass 8, 373–386.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chierchia, G (2006). Broaden Your Views: Implicatures of Domain Widening and the “Logicality” of Language. Linguistic Inquiry 37, 535–590. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2006.37.4.535CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chierchia, G, Fox, D and Spector, B (2012). Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon. In Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning III. Boston: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 2297–2331.Google Scholar
Crain, S (2012). The emergence of meaning (Vol. 135). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cummins, J (1978). Bilingualism and the development of metalinguistic awareness. Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology 9, 131–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Degen, J and Tanenhaus, MK (2011). Making inferences: the case of scalar implicature processing. In Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society 33, 3299–3304.Google Scholar
Degen, J and Tanenhaus, MK (2015). Processing scalar implicature: A constraint-based approach. Cognitive Science 39, 667–710.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
DeLuca, V, Miller, D, Pliatsikas, C and Rothman, J (2019). Brain adaptations and neurological indices of processing in adult second language acquisition. In Schwieter, J and Paradis, M (eds), The Handbook of the Neuroscience of Multilingualism. Wiley, pp. 170–196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Neys, W and Schaeken, W (2007). When people are more logical under cognitive load dual task impact on scalar implicature. Experimental Psychology 54, 128–133. https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169.54.2.128CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Feld, SL (1981). The focused organization of social ties. American journal of sociology 86, 1015–1035.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galambos, SJ and Goldin-Meadow, S (1990). The effects of learning two languages on levels of metalinguistic awareness. Cognition 34, 1–56.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grice, HP (1975). Logic and Conversation. In Stainton, J (ed), Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language: A Concise Anthology. Ontario: Broadview Press, pp. 41–58.Google Scholar
Grice, HP (1989). Studies in the way of words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Guasti, M, Chierchia, G, Crain, S, Foppolo, F, Gualmini, A and Meroni, L (2005). Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures. Language and Cognitive Processes 20, 667–696. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960444000250CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gullifer, JW and Titone, D (2019). Characterizing the social diversity of bilingualism using language entropy. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–12.Google Scholar
Gürel, A (2004). Selectivity in L2-induced L1 attrition: a psycholinguistic account. Journal of Neurolinguistics 17, 53–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gürel, A (2007). Linguistic determinants of L1 attrition. Language Attrition: Theoretical perspectives, 99–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gutiérrez-Rexach, J (2001). The semantics of Spanish plural existential determiners and the dynamics of judgment types. Probus 13, 113–154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gutiérrez-Rexach, J (2010). Varieties of indefinites in Spanish. Language and Linguistics Compass 4, 680–693.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hagoort, P, Hald, L, Bastiaansen, M and Petersson, KM (2004). Integration of Word Meaning and World Knowledge in Language Comprehension, 304(5669), 438–441.Google Scholar
Hagoort, P and van Berkum, J (2007). Beyond the sentence given. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362, 801–811.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hald, LA, Steenbeek-Planting, EG and Hagoort, P (2007). The interaction of discourse context and world knowledge in online sentence comprehension. Evidence from the N400. Brain research 1146, 210–218.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hartshorne, J, Snedeker, J and Kim, A (2015). The neural computation of scalar implicature. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 30, 620–634. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2014.981195CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hartshorne, J, Tenenbaum, JB and Pinker, S (2018). A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers. Cognition 177, 263–277.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hirschberg, J (1991). A theory of scalar implicature. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Horn, LR (1972). On the semantic properties of logical operators in English. Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Horn, LR (1992). Pragmatics, implicature, abd presupposition. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics 2, 260–266.Google Scholar
Huang, YT and Snedeker, J (2018). Some inferences still take time: Prosody, predictability, and the speed of scalar implicatures. Cognitive Psychology 102, 105–126.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hunt, L, Politzer-Ahles, S, Gibson, L, Minai, U and Fiorentino, R (2013). Pragmatic inferences modulate N400 during sentence comprehension: Evidence from picture sentence verification. Neuroscience Letters 534, 246–251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2012.11.044CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hurlbert, JS (1991). Social networks, social circles, and job satisfaction. Work and occupations 18, 415–430.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iverson, M (2012). Advanced language attrition of Spanish in contact with Brazilian Portuguese. PhD dissertation, University of IowaGoogle Scholar
Iverson, M and Miller, D (2017). Language attrition and maintenance. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7, 704–708.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jakobson, R (1941). Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze. Uppsala: AlmqvistGoogle Scholar
Jegerski, J, Keating, G and VanPatten, B (2016). On-line relative clause attachment strategy in heritage speakers of Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism 20, 254–268.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Justice, EM and Dornan, TM (2001). Metacognitive differences between traditional-age and nontraditional-age college students. Adult education quarterly 51, 236–249.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kasparian, K and Steinhauer, K (2016). Confusing similar words: ERP correlates of lexical-semantic processing in first language attrition and late second language acquisition. Neuropsychologia 93, 200–217.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kasparian, K, Vespignani, F and Steinhauer, K (2017). First Language Attrition Induces Changes in Online Morphosyntactic Processing and Re-Analysis: An ERP Study of Number Agreement in Complex Italian Sentences. Cognitive science 41, 1760–1803.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Katsos, N (2008). The Semantics / Pragmatics Interface from an Experimental Perspective: The Case of Scalar Implicature. Synthese 165, 385–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kutas, M and Federmeier, KD (2011). Thirty years and counting: finding meaning in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP). Annual Review of Psychology 62, 621–647.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kutas, M and Hillyard, SA (1980). Reading senseless sentences: Brain potentials reflect semantic incongruity. Science 207, 203–205.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Landauer, TK, Foltz, PW and Laham, D (1998). An introduction to latent semantic analysis. Discourse Processes 25, 2–3. https://doi.org/10.1080/01638539809545028CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lau, EF, Phillips, C and Poeppel, D (2008). A cortical network for semantics:(de) constructing the N400. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9, 920.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leeman, J (2015). Heritage language education and identity in the United States. Annual review of applied linguistics 35, 100–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levinson, SC (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. MIT press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luck, SJ and Gaspelin, N (2017). How to get statistically significant effects in any ERP experiment (and why you shouldn't). Psychophysiology 54, 146–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marian, V, Blumenfeld, HK and Kaushanskaya, M (2007). The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q): assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 50, 940–967. https://doi.org/10.1044/1092-4388(2007/067)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Marinis, T (2003). Psycholinguistic techniques in second language acquisition research. Second Language Research 19, 144–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martí, L (2008). The semantics of plural indefinite noun phrases in Spanish and Portuguese. Natural Language Semantics 16, 1–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marty, PP and Chemla, E (2013). Scalar implicatures: Working memory and a comparison with only. Frontiers in Psychology 4, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00403CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, D, Giancaspro, D, Iverson, M, Rothman, J and Slabakova, R (2016). Not Just algunos, but indeed unos L2ers can acquire scalar implicatures in L2 Spanish. In Language Acquisition Beyond Parameters: Studies in honour of Juana M. Liceras. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 125–145.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nieuwland, MS, Ditman, T and Kuperberg, GR (2010). On the incrementality of pragmatic processing: An ERP investigation of informativeness and pragmatic abilities. Journal of Memory and Language 63, 324–346. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2010.06.005CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Norton, B (2010). Language and identity. Sociolinguistics and language education 23, 349–369.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noveck, IA and Posada, A (2003). Characterizing the time course of an implicature: An evoked potentials study. Brain and Language 85, 203–210. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0093-934X(03)00053-1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oldfield, RC (1971). The assessment and analysis of handedness: the Edinburgh inventory. Neuropsychologia 9, 97–113.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ortega, L (2013). SLA for the 21st century: Disciplinary progress, transdisciplinary relevance, and the bi/multilingual turn. Language Learning 63, 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Papafragou, A and Musolino, J (2003). Scalar implicatures: experiments at the semantics – pragmatics interface. Cognition 86, 253–282.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paradis, J (2007). Early bilingual and multilingual acquisition. Handbook of Applied Linguistics 5, 15–44.Google Scholar
Politzer-Ahles, S, Fiorentino, R, Jiang, X and Zhou, X (2013). Distinct neural correlates for pragmatic and semantic meaning processing: An event-related potential investigation of scalar implicature processing using picture-sentence verification. Brain Research 1490, 134–152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2012.10.042CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Potowski, K (2007). Language and identity in a dual immersion school (Vol. 63). Multilingual Matters.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potowski, K (2013). Language maintenance and shift. In Bayley, R, Cameron, R, & Lucas, C (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar
Potowski, K (Ed.). (2018). The Routledge handbook of Spanish as a heritage language. Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pouscoulous, N, Noveck, IA, Politzer, G and Bastide, A (2007). A developmental investigation of processing costs in implicature production. Language Acquisition 14, 347–375. https://doi.org/10.1080/10489220701600457CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prigogine, I, Physicien, C (1961). Introduction to thermodynamics of irreversible processes (Vol. 7). New York: Interscience Publishers.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2018). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. URL http://www.R-project.org/.Google Scholar
Reder, F, Marec-Breton, N, Gombert, JE and Demont, E (2013). Second-language learners’ advantage in metalinguistic awareness: A question of languages’ characteristics. British Journal of Educational Psychology 83, 686–702.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roehl, A and Stewart, AH (2018). Impact of Social Networking Sites and Digital Applications Upon Teens. Journal of Family & Consumer Sciences 110, 37–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rothman, J (2008). Why all counter-evidence to the Critical Period Hypothesis in second language acquisition is not equal or problematic. Language and Linguistics Compass 2, 1063–1088.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rothman, J and Iverson, M (2010). Independent normative assessments for bi/multilingualism, Where art thou. Multilingual Norms, 33–51.Google Scholar
Sauerland, U (2012). The computation of scalar implicatures: Pragmatic, lexical or grammatical? Linguistics and Language Compass 6, 36–49. https://doi.org/10.1002/lnc3.321CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmid, MS and Köpke, B (2017). The relevance of first language attrition to theories of bilingual development. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7, 637–667.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schmid, MS, Köpke, B and De Bot, K (2011). Language attrition as a complex, non-linear development. International Journal of Bilingualism 17, 675–682.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, BD and Sprouse, RA (1996). L2 cognitive states and the full transfer/full access model. Second Language Research 12, 40–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, BD and Sprouse, RA (2013). Generative approaches and the poverty of the stimulus. In Herschensohn, J and Young-Scholten, M (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 137–158.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sikos, L, Tomlinson, S, Traut, H and Grodner, D (2013). Incremental computation of scalar implicatures: An ERP study. In Poster Presented at the 26th Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference.Google Scholar
Skordos, D and Papafragou, A (2016). Children's derivation of scalar implicatures: Alternatives and relevance. Cognition 153, 6–18.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Slabakova, R (2010). Scalar implicatures in second language acquisition. Lingua 120, 2444–2462.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorace, A (2005). Selective optionality in language development. In Cornips, L and Corrigan, KP (eds), Syntax and variation. Reconciling the biological and the social. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 55–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorace, A (2011). Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1, 1–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorace, A (2016). Language and cognition in bilingual production: the real work still lies ahead. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19, 895–896.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperber, D and Wilson, D (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Spychalska, M, Kontinen, J and Werning, M (2016). Investigating scalar implicatures in a truth-value judgement task: evidence from event-related brain potentials. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 3798, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2016.1161806Google Scholar
Stowe, LA, Kaan, E, Sabourin, L and Taylor, RC (2018). The sentence wrap-up dogma. Cognition 176, 232–247. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.03.011CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Syrett, K, Austin, JR, Sánchez, L, Germak, C, Lingwall, A, Perez-Cortes, S, Arias-Amaya, A and Baker, H (2017a). The influence of conversational context and the developing lexicon on the calculation of scalar implicatures: Insights from Spanish-English bilingual children. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.14019.syrGoogle Scholar
Syrett, K, Lingwall, A, Perez-Cortes, S, Austin, JR, Sánchez, L, Baker, H, Germak, C and Arias-Amaya, A (2017b). Differences between Spanish monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual children in their calculation of entailment-based scalar implicatures. Glossa 2, 1–19.Google Scholar
Tanner, D, Grey, S and van Hell, JG (2017). Dissociating retrieval interference and reanalysis in the P600 during sentence comprehension. Psychophysiology 54, 248–259.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tavano, EM (2010). The balance of scalar implicature. Dissertation, University of Southern California.Google Scholar
Vargas-Tokuda, M, Grinstead, J and Rexach, JG (2009). Context and the scalar implicatures of indefinites in child Spanish. Hispanic Child Languages, 93–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Villegas, A (2014). The role of L2 English immersion in the processing of L1 Spanish sentence complement/relative clause ambiguities. PhD Dissertation, Pennsylvania State University.Google Scholar
White, L. (2003). Second language acquisition and universal grammar. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wu, Z and Tan, J (2009). Scalar implicature in Chinese child language: An experimental study. Journal of Foreign Languages 3, 69–75.Google Scholar
Zhao, M, Liu, T, Chen, G and Chen, F (2014). Are scalar implicatures automatically processed and different for each individual? A mismatch negativity (MMN) study. brain research 1599, 137–149.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zurek, WH (2018). Complexity, entropy and the physics of information (Vol. 8). CRC Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar