Kreiner, H. & Maimon, N. .
Linguistic Cognition Lab, Ruppin Academic Center, Emeq-Hefer, Israel
While many studies of bilingualism examine language attrition, few investigate the memory of L1 that hasn't been used for many years. The present study used Ebbinghaus' relearning procedure to explore traces of L1 in individuals who claim to have no conscious memory of their L1. Ebbinghaus demonstrated that relearning is faster than new learning and argued that this effect reflects subtle memory traces that cannot be measured in direct memory tests. In Experiment 1 dominantly Hebrew speakers, who acquired Russian as L1 and lost it, learned 30 word-pairs composed of a Russian word and its translation to Hebrew. Their learning-curves were compared to these of a control group who never learned Russian. In Experiment 2 we used similar procedure to compare 3 groups: French L1, French L2 and a control group. The learning-curves from both experiments show slow learning for the control group, and much faster learning for the Russian/French L1 group. Surprisingly the learning-curves from French L2 were similar to those of the L1 group. The findings clearly demonstrate that the relearning procedure can reveal unconscious traces of a lost language. The implications of these findings to our understanding of language attrition and language learning will be discussed.