Kreiner, H. & Berman, M.
Ruppin Academic Center
Many studies of bilingualism document the acquisition of L2 and subsequent loss of dominance and even attrition of L1. However, little research investigated the long-term effects of L1 attrition. The present study explored traces of childhood Language that hasn't been used in long time. Individuals having undergone such L1 attrition claim to have no conscious memory of their L1. Hence we used Ebbinghaus' (1885) relearning procedure shown to be sensitive to subtle and unconscious memory traces. Ebbinghaus demonstrated that relearning was faster than new learning and proposed that the relearning effect reflects memory traces that cannot be measured in direct memory tests.
Thirty Hebrew speaking participants aged 25 on average were recruited: The experimental group included 15 participants who were cared for by a native Russian speaker before they were 5 years old, and didn't use Russian ever since; the control group included 15 participants who had no knowledge of Russian. All participants learned a list of 30 word-pairs composed of a Russian word and its translation to Hebrew. In an immediate recall-relearning procedure that repeated 4 times, the experimenter presented each Russian word and then either the participant successfully recalled the corresponding Hebrew word or the Russian-Hebrew word-pair was presented again. The learning curves recorded show a very small and slow increase in learning for the control group, and a much steeper increase for the Russian-exposed group. Item analyses reveal interesting differences in the learning curves that may be informative about factors that affect memory traces such as frequency and age of acquisition.
The findings clearly demonstrate that the relearning procedure can reveal unconscious traces of a lost language. The potential of this procedure as a tool for investigating the nature of these traces and exploring the relationship between acquisition and attrition of language will be discussed.