L1 Japanese Attrition of a 5 Year-Old Bilingual Child"
Yukawa Emiko,
Ph.D. Student
Stockholm University
The subject of this paper is a Japanese-English bilingual boy, Haruki, who was raised in Japan and then moved to Hawaii at the age of 5;5 for five months, during which time his stronger language, Japanese, suffered attrition due to a great decrease in exposure to it. Data on the process of the subject's L1 attrition and recovery after his return to Japan were collected through regular audio recordings of natural conversation, story-telling tasks, word games, fiction-making tasks, and conversations with a bilingual interlocutor, and then analyzed in terms of Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), errors, and codeswitching.
As a result, the following three points became clear: 1) After two or three months in an English-speaking environment, the subject was unable to produce sentences in his L1 Japanese except for set phrases. However he recovered his pre-departure oral production capability within five weeks of his return to Japan. 2) The subject's performance level varied greatly according to the type of task being performed. During the latter part of his sojourn in Hawaii, he was able to produce single words for the word games, but not complete sentences for natural conversation and story-telling tasks. Moreover, priming (cf. Bock, 1986) affected the length of sentences he could produce. 3) The L1 attrition experienced by this subject did not appear to be caused by a loss of/change in his knowledge of that language, but rather, by difficulties in processing that language, knowledge of which for the most part remained intact.
In the area of non-pathological language attrition, this type of observation of a subject's language processing ability, as well as his knowledge, is essential in order to gain a complete understanding of human language activity.
