It is well established that verb-noun collocations are difficult for L2 learners, but little is known about the extent to which such collocations are vulnerable to attrition under conditions of reduced input. The study is novel in that we focus on L2 attrition rather than L1 attrition, and because we focus on Saudi Arabian returnees, who have so far hardly been studied. These are compared to child, adolescent and adult heritage speakers in the US. Receptive knowledge of English collocations was measured with a novel online acceptability judgement task and an online gap-filling task. We found that child returnees experienced more difficulties than the adolescent returnees, because the child returnees had not acquired collocations to the same extent as the adolescent returnees, and they experienced more crosslinguistic influence from Arabic. The current study also provides some counter evidence against the claim that every bilingual is an attriter.

中文翻译：

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注意海归和传统使用者之间的动词-名词搭配：第二语言英语搭配有多容易受到损耗的影响？


众所周知，动词-名词搭配对二语学习者来说很困难，但对于这种搭配在输入减少的情况下在多大程度上容易受到损耗知之甚少。这项研究的新颖之处在于，我们关注的是 L2 流失而不是 L1 流失，而且我们关注的是沙特阿拉伯的海归，到目前为止，他们几乎没有被研究过。这些与美国的儿童、青少年和成人传统使用者进行了比较。通过新颖的在线可接受性判断任务和在线空白填补任务来测量对英语搭配的接受知识。我们发现，儿童返乡者比青少年返乡者经历更多的困难，因为儿童返乡者没有获得与青少年返乡者相同的搭配程度，并且他们受到了更多来自阿拉伯语的跨语言影响。目前的研究还提供了一些反驳证据，反对每个双语都是消耗者的说法。