query: reviving language in native speaker who has forgotten it

Fri Apr 27 20:07:34 UTC 2012

Professor Moira Yip of University College London (who is not a member of the SEELANGS list) has expertise in this area. She writes:

There's quite a lot of interesting work on this, and for your purposes I think Masha Polinsky's work would be worth a look. She did a lot of work on Russian-Americans a while back, so if you Google language attrition, Russian, Polinsky, Harvard you will get a good place to start. This paper might be one good starting ppint:
http://scholar.harvard.edu/mpolinsky/files/Offprint.pdf

One of your respondents referred to studies with adopted Korean children. The best known work was mostly done in France, not the US, with children adopted from Korea, and as far as I am aware a very wide range of studies found pretty much no difference between these children as adults (adopted very young, and possibly having had quite traumatic lives pre-adoption) and non-adopted French adults. I think the work was done by Frank Ramus and Emanuel Dupoux and colleagues?

But children who came as late as 8 are in a somewhat different category, and it is also clear there is a huge range of variation in how much is lost and how much can be recovered.

Moira Yip 

-- 
Professor Moira Yip (Emerita)
UCL Linguistics

m.yip at ucl.ac.uk
+44 (0)777-556-2575

> From: Jane Frances Hacking <j.hacking at UTAH.EDU>
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] query: reviving language in native speaker who has forgotten it
> Date: 27 April 2012 19:49:11 GMT+01:00
> To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
> Reply-To: "SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list" <SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu>
> 
> I had two such students in my class a few years ago; I recorded them as part of an accentedness rating task that also included native speakers and more advanced Russian learners.  NS listeners were very perplexed by them. They would comment on their “good pronunciation” being weird because they stumbled over what they were saying (it was a reading task). 
> Jane
> 
> 
> On 4/27/12 12:35 PM, "anne marie devlin" <anne_mariedevlin at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
>> The general consensus is that language attrition is more or less permanent when it happens in pre-pubescent children which supports Alina's observations.  I did think it was interesting when you mentioned that your student could repeat what he had heard wonderfully.  There was a recent study carried out on Korean heritage children adopted by American parents at a very early age.  when they were tested for language retention may years later, as expected nothing had remained; however further testing revealed that the Korean born informants could differentiate between sounds much better than their non-Korean counterparts.  this could provide evidence that at least some part of the phonological memory of the first or birth language remains which could account for your student's ability to repeat.  Very interesting
>> AM
>>  
>> Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2012 13:42:25 -0400
>> From: aisrael at AMERICAN.EDU
>> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] query: reviving language in native speaker who has forgotten it
>> To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
>> 
>> In my experience it took about half a year for adopted kids to loose Russian completely. I am speaking of those adopted between 6 and 10 that I met. 
>> 
>> Here's an article supporting a total "rewriting" of the language in the brain: http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/13/2/155.full
>> 
>> On Apr 27, 2012, at 12:39 PM, KALB, JUDITH wrote:
>> 
>>> Dear colleagues,
>>> I wonder if any of you can help me with a student who was born in Russia, adopted at age 8 after a very difficult stint in an orphanage, grew up in NY, and is now enrolled in first-year Russian language.  He does not remember his Russian but is interested in reviving it.  He has had a lot of trouble with grammar, reading, etc., but when I have him listen to conversations, etc., he can repeat them beautifully—so the language is still somewhere in there, apparently.  He’s interested in working over the summer to try to get further with it.  Do you have suggestions on methods, programs, etc. that might be helpful?
>>> Many thanks!
>>> Judith
>>>  
>>> Dr. Judith E. Kalb
>>> Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature
>>> Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
>>> University of South Carolina
>>> Columbia, SC 29208
>>> jkalb at sc.edu
>>> 
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>> 
>> Alina Israeli
>> Associate Professor of Russian
>> LFS, American University
>> 4400 Massachusetts Ave.
>> Washington DC 20016
>> (202) 885-2387  fax (202) 885-1076
>> aisrael at american.edu
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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