What is it about?
Making a distinction between performance and competence in the language of an attriter is contingent upon systematically testing whether attrition at the level of representation is possible, and studying linguistically isolated attriters is a necessary step to uncovering the limits of language change within an individual. We argue that a distinction is possible if one uses a combination of brain and behavioral methods, as has been used to verify whether L2ers simply appear to perform like native speakers or indeed have a representational competence similar to that of native speakers.
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Why is it important?
This brief paper highlights areas pertinent to research on language attrition and offers a new hypothesis regarding the nature of relative first language stability. We propose various ways in which language attrition can and should be tackled in order to tease apart competence issues from production issues.
Perspectives
The purpose of this article was to shed light on new ideas that can contribute to a growing body of work on language attrition. It was a pleasure to write the paper and I hope it gets researchers thinking about the ways in which we test our subjects, the questions we ask, and the theoretical motivation for those questions.
David Miller
University of Reading
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This page is a summary of: Language attrition and maintenance, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, December 2017, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/lab.00009.ive.
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