Hadil Alraddadi & Jeanine Treffers-Daller (University of Reading)

This study explores L2 attrition, which has received very little attention in the literature on heritage speakers so far (Schmid, 2023). The specific focus is on verb-noun collocations, which are known to be difficult for L2 learners, and are vulnerable under conditions of reduced input (Kopotev et al, 2022; Pulido, 2022). Here we ask whether English verb-noun collocations are vulnerable to attrition, and whether there is influence for the effect of L1 on processing of these collocations. In addition, we study the effect of individual difference variables (including age of onset of bilingualism, age at return and length of residence in the country of origin) affect online processing of collocations.

Participants were 44 Arabic-English adult bilinguals who had lived in the US for an extended period of time and had returned to Saudi Arabia  before the age of 11 (child returnees) or after the age of twelve (adolescent returnees). These were compared to 20 adult heritage speakers who had grown up in the US and still lived there at the time of data collection.  The experimental tasks were an online acceptability judgement task (AJT) and a gap-fill task (GFT), which measured receptive and productive knowledge of English collocations which were either congruent or incongruent with Arabic, and were administered online via Pavlovia. In addition, a range of tasks was used to measure language knowledge and use in both languages.

The data were analysed with mixed effects modeling under R. The mixed model results of the AJT and GFT confirmed that reaction times among the child returnees are vulnerable to age effects: the less time child returnees spent in an English-speaking environment while growing up and the younger they were when they moved (back) to Saudi Arabia, the more problems they encounter when processing English collocations. There was also an interaction between English attitudes and English-only collocations affecting reaction time on the productive task, suggesting that bilinguals who hold stronger positive attitudes towards English can process these incongruent collocations faster. Finally, we found that child returnees who had moved back to SA during childhood were more affected by Arabic transfer than the adolescent returnees who had been in US for longer periods of time. However, there was little evidence of attrition among the returnees, as their performance was similar to the adult heritage speakers in the US. Drawing upon the support of Wiese et al. (2022) for the inclusion of HSs within the native speaker continuum, our analysis suggests that returnees, as a subset of HSs, should be considered as being on the native language continuum too. The talk will finish with a discussion of implications for the study of L2 attrition in heritage speakers and returnees.