New book examines language loss among multilingual speakers

Penn State professor in German and linguistic Michael Putnam has spent a good part of his career thinking about linguistic attrition, or “loss of language”, among bi- and multilingual speakers. Now is the basis of his latest book.

Putnam and David Natvig, associate professor of Nordic linguistics at the University of Stavanger in Norway, are the authors of the new book, “An Introduction to Language Attrition: Linguistic, Social and Cognitive Perspectives”.

Published by Routledge, the book provides readers with a prospective overview of the diversity of research examining why speakers of two or more languages ​​can undergo a loss of competence in their first or additional languages.

It is geared to advanced studs and researchers of theoretical and application linguistic, bilingualism and heritage linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, education and various other fields, according to putnam, director of graduate studies in the college of the Liberal Arts’ Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages ​​and Literature, Director of the Program in Linguistics, Associate Director of the Center for Language Science and Director of the Max Kade Institut de Recherche-American.

Putnam explained that the attrition of language has been sought for years, but mainly from the point of view of pathological conditions such as a stroke or aphasia.

“The goal of this book is double,” he said. “First, to emphasize that research on” loss of language “also occurs in non-pathological contexts. Secondly, to better understand what is happening here, my co-author and I demonstrate that a multifaceted approach is necessary.”

This approach, said Putnam, would take into account “social parameters, lexical and grammatical constraints and the cognitive information processing”, the three parts of language attrition that he and Natvig explore in depth in the book. Progress has been made in these three areas, he said, but research has been largely carried out in silos separated from each other.

Those who seek loss of language from a sociolinguistic point of view examine how a second language begins to encroach on a primary language in a specific social field.

“For example, you emigrate to a country and the language of the house and the neighborhood and the church community will remain the language with which you have come,” said Putnam. “But the workplace, school, newspapers, television, radio – when you have more of these types of parameters where you will not be able to use the first language and the second language is omnipresent. Finally, more and more elements of the second language.”

Then there are researchers like putnam who specialize in the structural properties of a language.

“The effects of this is not completely uniform at all levels,” he said. “The sound systems, the phonology and the structure of the sentences, that is to say syntax, are much less vulnerable to attrition in relation to morphology, that is to say the way the words are constructed, and the lexicon, that is to say the way in which words are stored in a short and long memory. This is surprising. Why is it? What is the way about the way in mind?

Meanwhile, cognitive neuroscience researchers have made their own loss of language in recent years. They examine how attrition occurs “in real time and in milliseconds” using eye monitoring and brain waves, said Putnam, which will become in January the new co-editor of LanguageThe flagship newspaper of the Linguistic Society of America.

“What they are starting to see, what is fascinating is that in terms of millisecond, there seems to be a change in treatment when language attrition occurs,” he said. “There seem to be certain electric points when a native speaker meets a lexical element which is surprising, like, for example,” I like to drink my coffee with socks. “You see a point with the verb ending. With people under attrition, you see that they do not have the same level of the point.

Although attrition is very real, this does not mean that the person loses his ability to speak the language in question, said Putnam. It is rather that they simply cannot actively recover what they need at the moment, or they are ultimately able to do it, but with difficulties.

Hope in the future is to integrate these three strands into a several -component approach to combat loss of language, said Putnam.

“Why don’t we try simply to talk about the attrition of language as a phenomenon of the dynamic life of bilingual and multilingual, and in this state, things are unstable, but what happens so that the system is stabilized again?” Said putnam. “How long do we need to make various grammar elements are returned and relearn things? These are the questions that should be asked. If we know more about attrition, what is the fast way to bring people there? Because if we know more, it could be a better return on investment.”

Indeed, this more unified approach could have an important societal impact, shape independent and collaborative research and improve pedagogy, said Putnam.

He is convinced that he and other Penn State teachers will play a big role in carrying out this work.

“This should have a cost -effective analysis for students who invest time – and money – in learning languages,” said Putnam. “We agree to know more about what is more easily kept longer and what could be more vulnerable to losses and decomposition over time. And this research will continue to focus on heritage and languages ​​in danger, by helping students and researchers in efforts to keep them and preserve them.”