Lexico-Semantic Attrition of Native Language: Evidence From Russian–Hebrew Bilinguals

Language Learning. 2024. P. 1–30.

Gallo F., Bermúdez-Margaretto B., Malyshevskaya A., Shtyrov Y., Kreiner H., Pokhoday M., Petrova A., Myachykov A.

Native language (L1) attrition is ubiquitous in modern globalized society,but its cognitive/psycholinguistic mechanisms are poorly understood. We investigatedlexico-semantic L1 attrition in L1 Russian immigrants in Israel, who predominantly usetheir second language (L2), Hebrew, in daily life. We included Russian monolinguals asa control group. We tested two potential causal mechanisms of attrition: L2 interferenceversus L1 disuse. Participants completed a fill-the-gap task in two conditions: accuracy(producing one exactly matching word) and scope (providing as many synonyms as possible). We expected L2 interference and L1 disuse to lead to the differential reduc-tion of accuracy and scope features, respectively. Lower scores for attriters emerged in the accuracy but not in the scope condition. Moreover, attitude towards L1 influencedattriters’ accuracy—but not scope—performance, with higher L1 preference predictinghigher accuracy. We provide evidence for lexico-semantic attrition in adult immigrants,pointing to L2 interference as the primary cause of impaired lexical retrieval.

Keywords: Russian, bilingualism, Hebrew, Lexical retrieval, language attrition