Monika Susanne Schmid

University of York

ERPs (Event-Related Potentials) have become a widely-used measure to study second language (L2) processing. To study individual differences, traditionally a component outcome measure is calculated by averaging the amplitude of a participant's brain response in a pre-specified time window of the ERP waveform in different conditions (e.g., the 'Respo...

The way we acquire a second language is fairly well understood. But how we lose our language skills - after leaving school, for example - is more of a mystery. Here, linguist Monika S. Schmid describes some of the problems encountered in quantitative investigations of second language attrition

Event-related potentials (ERPs) in the processing of grammatical violations typically investigate differences between natives and second language speakers by averaging the amplitude of a participant’s brain response in a pre-specified time window by condition. This approach suffers from the problem that time windows are defined arbitrarily, and tha...

Instructed foreign language knowledge – that is, language skills acquired exclusively in the classroom without the benefit of any significant immersion experience – remains a vastly neglected area of studies on language learning in general and language attrition in particular. There is also little consideration of foreign language attrition and mai...

Lexical access and lexical diversity are often assumed to be vulnerable to first language (L1) attrition. They also differ between monolinguals and nonimmersed bilinguals. This raises the question whether lexical attrition can be ascribed to nonuse or to competition between the two languages. We compare two populations of late L2 learners of Dutch...

The term “language attrition” refers to any process by which a language which an individual commands may be restructured, modified, or otherwise affected by another language in such a way that it less closely resembles the idealized version known and used by monolingual speakers than it did before this crosslinguistic influence started. The phenome...

Recent decades have seen an increase in research informing our understanding of the complex ways in which bilingual development is shaped by biological, cognitive, and behavioral factors. We investigate the predictors that shape, drive, and constrain the development of the first language (L1) of bilinguals, focusing on 92 Turkish–English bilingual...

en Linguistic complexity is neither easily defined nor measured. The challenge in finding reliable ways to measure linguistic complexity is even more pronounced when the variation of contexts in which complexity is measured is taken into account. This paper therefore aims at finding measures for assessing syntactic and lexical complexity that are s...

This study uses the Perceptual Assimilation Model for Suprasegmentals (PAM-S) (So & Best, 2008, 2010), supported by the assumptions of the L2 Intonation Learning theory (LILt, Mennen, 2015), to investigate how young heritage speakers of Cantonese living in the United States acquired Cantonese tones. Sixty-seven heritage speakers, aged 5–11, were te...

There is a host of criticism of the practice of language analysis for the determination of origin (LADO) from the point of view of various branches of linguistics (forensic linguistics, contact linguistics, sociolinguistics etc.). The present contribution offers an additional perspective from the area of multilingual development. I argue that, in t...

This investigation aimed to provide insights into the controversial debate on the role that age at onset of bilingualism plays in human language capacity with a focus on what it entails for first language (L1) attrition. L1 performance of Turkish immigrants (n = 57) in the United Kingdom with age at onset ranging between 7 and 34 years was compared...

Late bilinguals who spend (part of) their adult lives in an environment where a language other than the one they learned in childhood is spoken typically experience a range of language development phenomena. Most obviously, they will acquire some level of receptive and/or productive knowledge of the new, or second, language (L2). How basic or advan...

At the heart of most investigations into language attrition are the actual linguistic manifestations of the process: observable phenomena of how a particular individual uses or comprehends language differently after becoming bilingual from how they used or comprehended it in the past, or from how other monolingual speakers do this. This chapter giv...

This collection brings together leading names in the field of bilingualism research to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Studies in Bilingualism series. Over the last 25 years the study of bilingualism has received a tremendous amount of attention from linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. The breadth of coverage...

Research on second language acquisition and bilingual development strongly suggests that when a previously monolingual speaker becomes multilingual, the different languages do not exist in isolation: they are closely linked, dependent on each other, and there is constant interaction between these different knowledge systems. Theoretical frameworks...

This collection brings together two areas of research that are currently receiving great attention in both scientific and public spheres: cognitive aging and bilingualism. With ongoing media focus on the aging population and the need for activities to forestall cognitive decline, experiences that appear effective in maintaining functioning are of g...

This chapter provides an overview of the issues and challenges in research on first language attrition. While attrition is considered the beginning of the process of language shift and loss in the general field of language contact, a person’s language may undergo attrition without being completely lost, partly through non-use and partly through int...

The purpose of this study was to investigate phonological attrition in 10 native Albanian speakers who acquired Standard Southern British English (SSBE) as a second language (L2) in London, United Kingdom. A contrast was examined which is phonemic in Albanian but allophonic in SSBE, namely the production of light and dark lateral approximants. Impr...

According to Flege’s Speech Learning Model, the speech sounds of a bilingual’s languages are contained in one common phonological space. This predicts bidirectional influence on the articulation of these speech sounds. We investigated the influence of a late-learned second language (L2) on the first language (L1) in a group of German L1 attriters i...

It was suggested in the introduction to this volume that cumulative evidence from studies investigating populations of learners from varying linguistic backgrounds, under different learning contexts, and with a range of experimental designs is necessary in order to gain further insight into fundamental questions of bilingual development—such as whe...

How are two or more languages learned and contained in the same mind or the same community? This handbook presents an up-to-date view of the concept of multi-competence, exploring the research questions it has generated and the methods that have been used to investigate it. The book brings together psychologists, sociolinguists, Second Language Acq...

In their seminal paper, Pawley and Syder (1983) argued that fluent and idiomatic control of a language is largely the result of what they described as access to ”lexicalized sentence stems”. Such word sequences are familiar to both speaker and hearer and presumably can be retrieved from the mental lexicon as a whole, thereby freeing processing capa...

This study addresses a gap in the literature on executive function advantages among bilingual speakers by investigating a group of elderly, long-term, immersed bilinguals. Our participants are native Dutch speakers who emigrated to Australia as adults and have spent many years in that country. They are compared on a range of cognitive and linguisti...

In this study we investigate the effect of age of acquisition (AoA) on grammatical processing in second language learners as measured by event-related brain potentials (ERPs). We compare a traditional analysis involving the calculation of averages across a certain time window of the ERP waveform, analyzed with categorical groups (early vs. late), w...

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Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions The present study investigated which factors would best predict second-language (L2) fluency in a group of long-term L2 speakers of different English varieties with German as their first language. Design/methodology/approach L2 fluency was conceptualized in terms of utterance fluency for which speed,...

This study explores the extent to which first language (L1) versus second language (L2) use and attachments to native versus majority language and culture influence the proficiency in the L2 Dutch among the Turkish-Dutch bilinguals. The community under investigation is of particular significance because it represents the largest non-Western ethnic...

Bilingual and monolingual language processing differ, presumably because of constant parallel activation of both languages in bilinguals. We attempt to isolate the effects of parallel activation in a group of German first-language (L1) attriters, who have grown up as monolingual natives before emigrating to an L2 environment. We hypothesized that p...

There remains considerable disagreement about which factors drive second language (L2) ultimate attainment. Age of onset (AO) appears to be a robust factor, lending support to theories of maturational constraints on L2 acquisition. The present study is an investigation of factors that influence grammatical and lexical complexity at the stage of L2...

The present text addresses theoretical and practical concerns that are relevant for large-scale investigations of bilingual development. It discusses the necessity of approaches that use a variety of elicitation methods and assess different populations. Such investigations can help resolve some of the most important current questions and controvers...

Fluent speech depends on the availability of well-established linguistic knowledge and routines for speech planning and articulation. A lack of speech fluency in late second-language (L2) learners may point to a deficiency of these representations, due to incomplete acquisition. Experiments on bilingual language processing have shown, however, that...

The bilingual advantage hypothesis contends that speakers of more than one language accrue cognitive benefits over their monolingual peers. In the Simon Task (1969), participants respond with a left- or right-key press to the colour of red and green squares that are presented either on the left or right side of the screen. The response time differe...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) have become a standard method in many areas of cognitive research, including second-language research, over the last decade and a half (Van Hell and Tokowicz 2010). ERPs can provide evidence which is central to the controversy on the similarity or difference of first and second-language processing. However, the...

Abstract This study explores the extent to which L1 (first language) versus L2 (second language) use and emotional attachments to native versus majority language and culture influence the proficiency in the L2 Dutch among the Turkish-Dutch bilinguals. The community under investigation is of particular significance because it represents the largest...

This paper presents an investigation of lexical first language (L1) attrition, asking how a decrease in lexical accessibility manifests itself in long-term residents in a second language (L2) environment. We question the measures typically used in attrition studies (formal tasks and type-token ratios) and argue for an in-depth analysis of free spok...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) can reveal online processing differences between native speakers and second language (L2) learners during language comprehension. Using the P600 as a measure of native-likeness, we investigated processing of grammatical gender agreement in highly proficient immersed Romance L2 learners of Dutch. We demonstrate...

A controversial topic in research on second-language acquisition is whether residual variability and optionality in high-proficiency late second-language (L2) learners is merely the outcome of cross-linguistic transfer, competition, and processing limitations, or whether late learners have an underlying representational deficit due to maturational...

How independent are the sound systems of the two languages a bilingual speaks? There is ample evidence that in a late-learned second language (L2), the pronunciation remains shaped by the early-learned first language (L1) up to high levels of general proficiency (Flege & Schmidt, 1995; Flege et al., 1999). It is less well-established, however, to w...

This study examines the methodology of global foreign accent ratings in studies on L2 speech production. In three experiments, we test how variation in raters, range within speech samples, as well as instructions and procedures affects ratings of accent in predominantly monolingual speakers of German, non-native speakers of German, as well as long-...

The present article provides an exploration of ultimate attainment in second language (L2) and its limitations. It is argued that the question of maturational constraints can best be investigated when the reference population is bilingual and exposed on a regular basis to varieties of their first language (L1) that show cross-linguistic influence....

Native speakers of languages with transparent gender systems can use gender cues to anticipate upcoming words. To examine whether this also holds true for a non-transparent two-way gender system, i.e. Dutch, eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to click on one of four displayed items on a screen (e.g., Klik op \...

The present paper will present an overview of the state of the art in language attrition research, attempting to provide an integrated picture of the attrition process in the light of Dynamic Systems Theory. Recent findings suggest that a fully developed L1 system is a powerful attractor state, as defined by Dynamic Systems Theory. Once this state...

A recent study (Hopp & Schmid, forthc.) has demonstrated that very advanced long-term bilinguals exhibit a larger amount of variation in global foreign accent ratings when rated by native speakers than monolingual speakers of the same language, irrespective of whether the language in question is their L2 (late learners) or their L1 (late attriters)...

This study investigates constraints on ultimate attainment in second language (L2) pronunciation in a direct comparison of perceived foreign accent of 40 late L2 learners and 40 late first language (L1) attriters of German. Both groups were compared with 20 predominantly monolingual controls. Contrasting participants who acquired the target languag...

Speakers who live in an L2 environment for an extended period of time often experience change in the way in which they use their L1, a process referred to as L1 attrition. This article provides an overview of language attrition phenomena at various linguistic levels. However, attrition cannot be trivially or linearly related to factors such as the...

This study investigates constraints on ultimate attainment in second language (L2) pronunciation in a direct comparison of perceived foreign accent of 40 late L2 learners and 40 late first language (L1) attriters of German. Both groups were compared with 20 predominantly monolingual controls. Contrasting participants who acquired the target languag...

This study investigates whether lexical knowledge in the first language (L1) of late Turkish-Dutch bilinguals becomes less accessible for the production of fluent speech and in controlled experimental tasks as a result of extended stay in the Netherlands. It is also considered to what degree extra-linguistic factors can account for this phenomenon....

To think “bilingualism” is usually to think “second language” (L2). Virtually all research that is conducted on multilinguals focuses on the way in which they acquire and use the languages which are not their “native” one. Observations gained from that study are then compared to first language (L1) speakers, and attempts are made to pinpoint and ex...

The present contribution discusses recent developments and future directions in the attrition of instructed foreign languages, arguing for a distinction between this type of attrition and attrition involving second languages acquired implicitly in an immersion setting. An overview of the history of research in the field and the most prominent findi...

The goal of this study was to explore the contribution that a dynamic usage based (DUB) perspective can bring to the establishment of objective measures to assess L2 learners’ written texts and at the same time to gain insight into the dynamic process of language development. Four hundred and thirty seven texts written by Dutch learners of English...

This paper addresses the long-term effects of being exposed to a language early in life for a limited period of time, as is the case in international adoptees. Recent findings are divided as to whether such a situation will lead to sequential monolingualism or whether speakers do remain bilingual to some extent, although they cannot readily access...

The overwhelming bias for investigations of bilingualism is to focus on the increase of knowledge and crosslinguistic traffic from the L1 to the L2. Developments which concern loss, deterioration or reduced accessibility of knowledge and traffic from the L2 to the L1 are much less well-studied and understood, and usually treated as a somewhat margi...

This volume consists of a collection of papers that focus on structural/grammatical aspects of the process of first language attrition. It presents an overview of current research, methodological issues and important questions regarding first language attrition. In particular, it addresses the two most prominent issues in current L1 attrition resea...

This chapter will discuss the loss or attrition of a first language (L1) in an immigration setting. Based on two large-scale investigations of migrant populations with German as a first language (Schmid 2002; Schmid 2007), it will be investigated to what degree regular use of the first language in daily life and attitudes toward the culture of orig...

From structure to chaos: twenty years of modeling bilingualism / Diane Larsen-Freeman, Monika S. Schmid and Wander Lowie -- Psycholinguistic perspectives on language processing in bilinguals / Judith Kroll and Daan Hermans -- Triggered codeswitching: evidence from picture naming experiments / Mirjam Broersma -- Working memory capacity, inhibitory c...

Dynamic systems theory, a general theory of change and development, offers a new way to study first and second language development and requires a new set of tools for analysis of empirical data. After a brief introduction to the theory, this book, co-authored by several leading scholars in the field, concentrates on tools and techniques recently d...

Dynamic systems theory, a general theory of change and development, offers a new way to study first and second language development and requires a new set of tools for analysis of empirical data. After a brief introduction to the theory, this book, co-authored by several leading scholars in the field, concentrates on tools and techniques recently d...

'Language attrition' describes the loss of, or changes to, grammatical and other features of a language as a result of declining use by speakers who have changed their linguistic environment and language habits. In such a situation there may, for example, be simplification in the tense system or in certain properties of subordinate clauses; some vo...

Based on an analysis of the speech of long-term émigrés of German and Dutch origin, the present investigation discusses to which extent hesitation patterns in language attrition may be the result of the creation of an interlanguage system on the one hand or of language-internal attrition patterns on the other. We compare speech samples elicited by...

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. To the scientist, external change often implies drastic and challenging developments, particularly to the ways in which the data on which scientific investigations are based are observed, collected and analysed, as well as the pressure to adapt to these changes. Over the past decades, the technological rev...

Most linguistic processes – acquisition, change, deterioration – take place in and are determined by a complex and multifactorial web of language internal and language external influences. This implies that the impact of each individual factor can only be determined on the basis of a careful consideration of its interplay with all other factors. Th...

The primary aim of this study was to determine whether native speakers of German living in either Canada or the Netherlands are perceived to have a foreign accent in their native German speech. German monolingual listeners (n = 19) assessed global foreign accent of 34 L1 German speakers in Anglophone Canada, 23 L1 German speakers in the Dutch Nethe...

Speakers who routinely use more than one language may not use any of their languages in ways which are exactly like that of a monolingual speaker. In sequential bilingualism, for example, there is often evidence of interference from the L1 in the L2 system. Describing these interference phenomena and accounting for them on the basis of theoretical...

Emigration usually requires speakers to become bilingual, and eventually they may even become dominant in their second language. This can lead to a gradual loss of proficiency in the first language, a phenomenon referred to as first language attrition. As migrants become elderly, however, they sometimes report a "reversion" in language dominance, w...

One of the most puzzling observations for linguists is the difference between learning a language from birth and later in life: while all normally developing children can attain full native language proficiency, there is considerable variability in ultimate attainment among older speakers who attempt to acquire a second language (L2). There is an o...

Research on the bilingual mental lexicon has progressed considerably over the past 25 years. Two questions have received particular attention in this respect, namely organisational principles of a bilingual lexicon on the one hand and chronometrical aspects of on-line access in bilinguals on the other. A third important point that has been largely...

I. Introduction The study in progress that will be introduced in this paper explores development in the first and second languages among first generation Moroccan and Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands. More specifically, we investigate how the bilingual proficiency of Moroccan and Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands changes and grows over ti...

This volume provides a state-of-the-art treatment of research on language attrition, the non-pathological loss of a language through lack of exposure. It combines a review of past and present research with in-depth treatments of specific theoretical and methodological issues and reports on individual studies. Special prominence is given to the iden...

The overwhelming bias for investigations of bilingualism is to focus on the increase of knowledge and crosslinguistic traffic from the L1 to the L2. Developments which concern loss, deterioration or reduced accessibility of knowledge and traffic from the L2 to the L1 are much less well-studied and understood, and are usually treated as a somewhat m...