L1 Japanese Attrition and Regaining : Three Case Studies of Two Early Bilingual Children

Abstract: The present study reports three cases of LI Japanese loss and regaining (Shoko 3; 10, HI 5;5 and H2 7;0 at the time the subjects left Japan for non-Japanese environments) by two siblings (one of them was studied twice at two different times) who grew up as Japanese-English bilinguals from birth. It describes the lexical and syntactic changes of the language in details, discerns the nature of the loss, and investigates the relationship between attrition and age and pre-attrition proficiency.Oral production data were analyzed using various analytical instuments (TTR, use of non-Japanese words, MLU, complement structures and ellipsis of casemarkers, complex sentences, errors and fluency measurement). Elicited imitation and comprehension data as well as field notes were also analyzed. The study documented two cases (Shoko and HI) of quick Japanese attrition and another case (H2) of its maintenance. The two younger subjects (Shoko and HI) showed mild shrinkage of their vocabularies and drastic loss in their syntactic repertoires in as short a time as three months, while H2 did not. Despite a small portion of evidence which showed restructuring of their Japanese, the major reason for the younger subjects’ non-speaking was considered to be processing failure of the Japanese knowledge they still had mostly intact (the processing failure hypothesis), paricularly in accessing case-markers (case-marker inaccessibility). The three subjects had clearly different pre-attrition proficiencies in Japanese, especially in the stability of their use of complex syntactic structures. Thus it was hypothesized that H2’s Japanese was probably beyond the possible threshold proficiency level for its maintenance {the threshold level for language maintenance). It was speculated that there might be a certain age (biological development) which serves as a pre-requisite for such a threshold level to be attained.