Is it possible to forget your native language?

🌍 Can you forget your native language? 🤔

Yes, it is possible! This process is called language attrition, and it often occurs after many years of immigration to a new country with limited exposure to your native tongue. However, children are more vulnerable to language attrition than adults. Initially, vocabulary access tends to be the first to be impacted, while grammar remains relatively stable for a longer period. Language attrition doesn't mean that your native language is lost forever, nor do you have to start from scratch. Once you start practicing your native language again, your skills usually come back quickly. 🚀

The study by Kasparian and Steinhauer (2017) compared Italian immigrants in Canada who started experiencing native language attrition to Italian native speakers in Italy. Specifically, they were looking at how both groups perceived 4 types of sentences in Italian. All four types of the sentences had the same meaning but different word order. In Italian, all four types of word order are grammatically acceptable. It’s just two options are more preferable than the other two. However, if these sentences are translated into English, only 2 out of the 4 types are grammatically correct. Both groups were shown the sentences and asked to rate them as correct or incorrect.

Both the behavioral results (participants’ actual answers) and the EEG results (electroencephalogram waves) showed that those types of sentences that are correct in Italian but incorrect in English were perceived differently by the groups. Unlike Italians residing in Italy, the immigrant group rated the sentences that are totally fine in Italian but incorrect in English as wrong. Remember, the sentences they were shown were in Italian. There were no English sentences.

It means that under the influence of extended English use, and/or decreased usage of their native language, the immigrants started losing their ability to differentiate between some correct and incorrect sentences in their native language.

Source:
Kasparian, K., & Steinhauer, K. (2017). When the second language takes the lead: Neurocognitive processing changes in the first language of adult attriters. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 389.
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Видео Is it possible to forget your native language? канала Oxana Kodirova