Native language (L1) attrition is ubiquitous in modern globalized society, but its cognitive/psycholinguistic mechanisms are poorly understood. We investigated lexico‐semantic L1 attrition in L1 Russian immigrants in Israel, who predominantly use their second language (L2), Hebrew, in daily life. We included Russian monolinguals as a control group. We tested two potential causal mechanisms of attrition: L2 interference versus L1 disuse. Participants completed a fill‐the‐gap task in two conditions: accuracy (producing one exactly matching word) and scope (providing as many synonyms as possible). We expected L2 interference and L1 disuse to lead to the differential reduction of accuracy and scope features, respectively. Lower scores for attriters emerged in the accuracy but not in the scope condition. Moreover, attitude towards L1 influenced attriters’ accuracy—but not scope—performance, with higher L1 preference predicting higher accuracy. We provide evidence for lexico‐semantic attrition in adult immigrants, pointing to L2 interference as the primary cause of impaired lexical retrieval.

中文翻译：

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母语的词汇语义磨损：来自俄语-希伯来语双语者的证据


母语（L1）损耗在现代全球化社会中普遍存在，但其认知/心理语言机制却知之甚少。我们调查了在以色列的 L1 俄罗斯移民的 L1 词汇语义损耗，他们在日常生活中主要使用第二语言 (L2) 希伯来语。我们将只会讲俄语的人作为对照组。我们测试了两种潜在的损耗因果机制：L2 干扰与 L1 废弃。参与者在两种条件下完成了填补空白的任务：准确性（产生一个完全匹配的单词）和范围（提供尽可能多的同义词）。我们预计 L2 干扰和 L1 废弃会分别导致精度和范围特征的差异降低。磨耗者的得分较低是在准确性方面，但在范围条件方面却没有。此外，对 L1 的态度影响了磨练者的准确性（但不影响范围）表现，较高的 L1 偏好预示着较高的准确性。我们提供了成年移民词汇语义损耗的证据，指出二语干扰是词汇检索受损的主要原因。