I Came Long Time Ago: Language attrition in long-time bilinguals

Alejandro Cuza & Ana T. Pérez-Leroux
University of Toronto

Do I sound odd in my native language? For many of us living abroad the answer is probably yes, but we don’t realize it until we go back home. Not to worry! It’s OK! You are bilingual.

Intense contact with a second dominant language (L2) by a prolonged period of time will, in most scenarios, cause some sort of attrition of your native language. By language attrition we mean the case where bilingual speakers say things monolingual speakers normally don’t say or find odd. For instance, in Toronto, the city where we live, about 2% of the population is Spanish-speaking. Census data shows that 25-44 year olds are the strongest demographic group among Spanish speakers. This suggests that many of these working age Spanish speakers are recent arrivals, but many have been here for decades.  Among these long time immigrants, you might hear something like Llame para atrás (lit: ‘Call back’) instead of Repita la llamada o Vuelva a  llamar (‘Repeat your call’, or ‘Call again’) when asking someone to call back. This is a vivid example of language influence among Spanish-English bilinguals in North America. The native language (Spanish) is unconsciously “restructured”, in order to welcome grammatical structures of the second language (English) as its own. In the last 15 years, researchers have examined cases of attrition by long-term immigrants in many grammatical areas. Factors such as age of immigration, length of contact and prestige of the native language plus many others have been linked directly or indirectly to language attrition.

Recent studies, including our own, have unveiled interesting similarities between how bilinguals process their second language, and how their first language is affected. The traditional argument in second language acquisition has been to say that learning after a certain age is ineffectual: after puberty adult learners are presumably not able to learn a second language as children do. The idea is that once the brain matures, the learning task is much more difficult and the learning can never be completed. Our work suggests this is not quite so, and that there is another good reason behind the learning difficulties of adult L2 learners, namely, transfer from the other language.

We have studied Cuban bilinguals living in the US and Canada for more than 15 years.  These individuals came as adults to this new land.  Yet many of them end up displaying similar language behavior as that of advanced L2 learners. Both long-time immigrants and L2 learners had specific patterns in the use of past tense forms in Spanish that differed significantly from that of monolinguals Spanish speakers. For instance, a classroom learner of Spanish wrote in a test Cuando joven me divertí mucho ‘When young, I enjoyed myself a lot.’  A native speaker would find these sentences a bit strange because of the verb form used.  In Spanish, the past tense has two forms: Tocó el piano and Tocaba el piano.  The former is the perfective tense used to refer to a unique event, while the latter is the imperfective tense used to refer to past habitual situations as when I say María tocaba el piano de niña. In English, these two meanings are conveyed with the simple past tense (Mary played the piano/Mary played the piano as a child). In our study, many immigrants and L2 learners were happy to allow the perfective tense to stand in these ‘when I was young…’ sentences, something recent Spanish immigrants disagreed with.

What these results suggest to us is that the difficulties L2 learners have should not be linked directly to brain maturation. As argued by researchers like Gisela Jia and others, the role of age in the learning of a second language is not so much about brain development but a byproduct of other factors also related to age. Children are better learners not necessarily because their brains have not matured yet but because they adapt to the new culture better and faster than adults. Kids want to fit in and interact with their peers. In the process, they absorb new cultural elements like music, movies, TV shows, games, etc., most of them in the dominant language, therefore living, literally, in a different language community from their parents. The issue here, then, is not how old you are but how quickly you integrate into the new language community.

These adult-child differences are just a fact of life. Adult immigrants are fully aware of the importance of mastering the second language, but at the same time they are also very aware of the need for keeping their native language alive. This is our dual responsibility as immigrants and language minorities. But we cannot live without change: as the poet said: nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.  ‘We, from back then, are no longer the same’.  Many years spent with the two languages in parallel means that sometimes one language will leak into the other.

Alejandro Cuza is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto. His research examines the L2 acquisition and L1 attrition of Spanish among Spanish-English bilinguals.
Specifically, he examines the role of linguistic transfer in the learning and loss of Spanish past tense semantic representations.
a.cuza@utoronto.ca

Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, Ph.D is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, University of Toronto Areas: Child Syntax, First and second language acquisition, Spanish Syntax, Bilingualism.  “In senior kindergarden, I made the startling discovery that some people could speak and even think in languages other than Spanish. I have since then been fascinated by the study of how languages differ at the syntax/semantics interface, and by how child and adult learners solve this part of the problem of language acquisition. My dissertation on relatives and interrogative clauses in the acquisition of Spanish and English led to explorations of referentiality in the acquisition of nominal and clausal structure.  I have conducted experiments on bare nominal idioms in child English, on null pronouns in L2 Spanish, on the role of tense in the acquisition of factivity, and on the Spanish subjunctive in irrealis contexts.  In ongoing work I explore how learners acquire functional items (such as definite articles, number or tense morphemes) that have comparable syntactic distribution across certain languages but lead to different semantic interpretations.”
at.perez.leroux@utoronto.ca
http://individual.utoronto.ca/perezleroux/

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