Will Emotional Effects Modulate L2 Lexical Attrition as they Do in L2 Acquisition?

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Second Language Acquisition
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Lexical attrition, the loss of second language (L2) vocabulary, is a significant area of study in bilingualism.
• The role of emotion in L2 attrition, particularly lexical attrition, remains underexplored.
• Existing models of L2 attrition do not fully account for emotional modulation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the modulation of emotional effects on L2 lexical attrition.
• To analyze the attrition patterns of emotional words in Chinese-English bilinguals.
• To determine if positive and negative emotional words exhibit different attrition rates.

Main Methods:

• A cross-sectional study design was employed.
• 188 Chinese-English bilinguals participated in the study.
• A 500-word vocabulary test was administered to assess L2 lexical attrition.

Main Results:

• Emotional effects were found to be as active in L2 attrition as in L2 acquisition.
• No significant difference was observed between the attrition rates of positive and negative emotional words.
• All emotional words followed a similar attrition pattern: rapid loss in the first 4 years, stability between years 5-8, and renewed rapid loss after year 9.

Conclusions:

• Emotional valence (positive vs. negative) does not significantly influence L2 lexical attrition rates.
• The study supports the Revised Hierarchical Model in explaining the modulation of emotional effects on L2 lexical attrition.
• This research is the first to examine emotional effects on L2 lexical attrition in Chinese-English bilinguals.