The study of language loss—or language attrition—was recognized as a field in 1980, when the University of Pennsylvania hosted the first conference ever on the theme. Most of the contributions to this conference stressed the need for systematic empirical investigation of the phenomenon of language attrition, which everybody seems to know about, but which very few scientists had actually looked into.

This study investigates loss of productive vocabulary in oral language, specifically in Portuguese as a third language for two English-Hebrew bilingual children, ages 9 and 13. The study investigated the lexical loss in Portuguese storytelling behavior after 1, 3, and 9 months of discontinued contact with the language. The analysis focused on the nature of the attrited productive lexicon, lexical production strategies used to compensate for forgotten vocabulary, and lexical retrieval processes during storytelling in Portuguese and in the children's two dominant languages.

A significant decrease was found in the total number of words produced in the Portuguese stories of the two children after 9 months, both in comparison to word total in earlier months and in comparison to total words in English and Hebrew stories. There was greater attrition in the case of the younger subject after 9 months than in that of his older sister. He used a more limited number of different words, as well as fewer and shorter T-units per utterance, which was not the case with regard to his sister. He also attrited proportionately more nouns than words from other word classes.

The subjects used at least six lexical production strategies in order to compensate for forgotten words—two of them L1-based (borrowing and foreignizing), and four of them intralingual (the use of a general word, approximation, circumlocution, and word abandonment). Their data also provided evidence of lexical retrieval processes. Examples of lexical production strategies and lexical retrieval processes are given.

The study of language attrition, whether it is concerned with first or second languages, focuses on the effects resulting from an individual's reduced use of the attrited language. Such reduction in use can be due to a change in the linguistic environment or to the termination of an instructional program. In either case, some other language (or languages) is or becomes the dominant one.

The present article reports on a series of studies, all focusing on individual attrition of English as a second language (ESL) in an environment where Hebrew is the dominant language. The predictor variables discussed are age, sociolinguistic features, input variables, and linguistic variables. The attrition process affecting English as a second language in a Hebrew dominant context seems to exhibit two major trends of change in language use: (a) a greater variability in the application of peripheral and highly marked structural rules, and (b) lower accessibility of specific lexical items. In each of these trends one can identify a limited reversal of the acquisition process, particularly with young children (5–8-year-olds) as well as a typological transfer process from the dominant language.

In the 1970s, Clyne conducted linguistic research on German-English and Dutch-English bilinguals in Australia. In the course of the study, he found evidence for second language attrition and first language reversion among his elderly informants (Clyne, 1981). In 1987, some 40 of the 200 Dutch informants tested in 1971 were retested in order to get longitudinal data on language maintenance and loss. The data show surprisingly little loss of proficiency in both Dutch and English over the years. This calls for a revision of the language reversion hypothesis as stated by Clyne in 1981. In the present article the hypothesis is modified to the extent that there seems to be some kind of “critical threshold” (Neisser, 1984) that has to be reached in order to retain the second language. First language reversion seems to be a common phenomenon among those immigrants who did not reach this threshold, but not among immigrants who did.

The tenability of the regression hypothesis as a basic principle for language attrition within languages has not been really questioned until now. In order to find out to what extent attrition might be the reverse of the process of acquisition, phenomena of attrition in the use of the German case system were studied. Two hypotheses were tested: the Linguistic Hypothesis and the Cognitive Hypothesis. the Linguistic Hypothesis is based on the notion of regression. According to this notion, attrition is the reverse of the language acquisition process. The Cognitive Hypothesis is based on the assumption that in natural cases of language acquisition, there is a tendency to establish a one-to-one correspondence between cognitive function and morphological case assignment. The results from experiments on case marking in headline-type constructions showed differences between native (L1) speakers and second language (L2) learners. In L1 speakers the relation between case marking and underlying semantic functioning becomes more prominent, whereas in L2 learners the nominative is used as a default case, indicating that morphological differentiations become reduced. This means that for L1 speakers the Cognitive Hypothesis provides a more adequate explanatory framework, whereas for L2 learners it is the Linguistic Hypothesis that is more appropriate.

The present study investigated the retention of school-learned French language skills in Dutch students across a period of 4 years following the training period. Two training levels were investigated: 4 and 6 years of French training. The skills tested were all receptive: general receptive proficiency; listening and reading comprehension; and receptive phonological, lexical, and grammatical skills. In addition, self-assessment measures were administered.

The results indicated that global skills improved, if anything, and that only lexical and, particularly, grammatical skills “attrited” during the period investigated. On the other hand, subjects' self-perception of their retention was much more negative.