 This is a presentation of between language competition as a driving force and foreign language attrition Which was a study done by Mick and McQueen and Lemhofer earlier this year So it looks at foreign language attrition and that's a Kind of a fancy way for saying You've forgotten the language It kind of works the same way as acquisition and that in acquisition you're learning the language and with attrition You're forgetting it The good news is is that past studies have confirmed that this is pretty easily reversible and you can gain back lost proficiency This particular theory is trying to look at a specific theory of How attrition works so two ideas previous to this theory and this isn't just linguistics this turns out to be General memory Forgetting so this also works in psychology So one is just decay theory you go looking for it and there's nothing there Another theory is that there's interference, so you know it But there's other items that are obscuring it like other memories are more important So let's say you know the word and Tagalog for Apple But you're you've been in the Philippines and you really aren't buying apples you're buying other tropical fruits So it's easier to remember things like Pineapple or banana or mango in Tagalog than the word for apple so the more Frequently thing use things are interfering with what you know And make it more difficult to recall So in this study what they're looking at is something called retrieval induced forgetting so They are talking about how words in a new language are introduced as Concepts so say sports So you might learn words for baseball and basketball and rugby and handball and tennis and furniture tables and chairs and Armours and couches and coffee tables Well, it turns out that if you practice the words are recalled pretty easily and That if you don't practice particularly in a category like if you just don't practice a bunch of words after learning them in a Specific category so you don't really review your furniture words because you're more interested in sports That you don't recall them as quickly or as accurately But here's the crazy thing if you say you are focusing on sports But you're interested in televised American sports because you're learning American English But you don't focus on the less common sports like say La Crosse So you you learned at once, but you're not practicing it despite practicing words like football and hockey and baseball Words like lacrosse are harder to recall Accurately and quickly There's some thought that this might be an inhibitory thing like the things you're trying to remember are Pushing back the less common things They're inhibiting your recall of that So what they're looking at is how does this Interference I'm gonna go back a slide Retrieval induced forgetting Play with something called language interference So language interference is a phenomenon of L2 and L3 You don't have language interference so much With L1 and L2 It's more when you've got L2 and L3. So if you're learning two languages at the same time It can cause problems and memory formations if you're studying two languages at the same time So like say you're studying French and Spanish if you study your French first and then you're Spanish The Spanish words may make it harder to recall the French words so what they're and Sometimes it can be the other way around if you've studied Say you studied French first and you got to a high degree of proficiency and now you're studying Spanish now What they're saying is that old information in your first language in your second language so in this example French It can make the retrieval in the new language Spanish tricky So they went to see what's causing this interference is it just knowing Language to and then learning language three. Is it studying them at the same time or Is there something else at play? So they put together a study and they got a bunch of Dutch native speakers Because this is done at a university in the Netherlands Dutch native speakers, most of them were surprised surprise Approximately undergraduate age They all spoke Dutch natively. They had English as their second most used language So that ruled out a bunch of people who might have been Strong speakers of French and then they said okay But you also need to have some exposure to Spanish be it a year of university or you've been to Spain For a couple of weeks or something. So in this study Spanish is the L3 participants took a Short course of learning words in Spanish in either Dutch or English Again, remember, they're all native speakers of Dutch and have strong proficiency in English They took a course on day two day one day two and day eight and they took tests on day two and day eight to see How quickly and how accurately were they remembering the Spanish words now the first thing you have to find out is did they learn the words and It absolutely looks like they did because when they took tests on day two So day one they learned the words day two they came back and took a test And then day eight they took another test and on day two the accuracy was a lot higher than on day eight Be it Spanish or English as the I'm sorry Dutch or English as the language of instruction for Spanish and the speed on day two was faster than on day eight and that's really Pretty much what we want to see because we want to see that they learned stuff Which they did on day two They showed a higher degree of accuracy and a higher degree of speed of recall and then we also want to make sure that we're seeing attrition to and We do because there's less accuracy of And when I say accuracy phonemic accuracy, so they counted phonemes in the word and Compared that to the correct word. So if we said ball instead of Hall that would be two correct Phonemes instead of all three correct phonemes So we're seeing that there's learning on day two and the recall isn't as strong on day eight, which is attrition So far so good. This is exactly what we're hoping to see But what about the interference? So what we wanted what the people running the study wanted to find out was Does it matter if the instruction is in your L1 or L2 when you're getting on to L3? And the answer is it doesn't seem to matter too terribly much. It matters the English instruction had slower recall less accuracy, but Looking at the data that they presented. I wouldn't say that it was wildly different. So L1 interferes with L3 lexical recall and L2 interferes with It interferes more. It's it's not like 10 times as much. It's half again double as much So L2 interferes more with L3 lexical recall And they did a second study where they instead of having Dutch and English as the language of instruction It was just straight Dutch. They taught Spanish but instead of trying to find out whether the language of instruction mattered what they did was is they Varied the frequency of the word so they use some more common words It's really less common words and it turns out that the pattern of interference looks the same The L1 and L2 pattern looks the same as High-frequency L1 and low-frequency L1. So your first language Doesn't interfere as much When the words are higher frequency, but when they're low-frequency It interferes like it's a second language At least that's the finding that they found in the paper and that's really really Really cool because that says There's something going on with word frequency, too. It's not just what language it the instruction is coming at you and for L3 It's also the frequency of the word in your L1 So what are these sources of interference? L1 and L2 well, here's one hypothesis L1 and Subsequently learned languages particularly languages learned after childhood are stored in a different place in the brain So there could be some inhibition thing like you're trying to remember Something in L3, but it's in the same place as L2 and you keep finding the L2 items and not the L3 items So there's one source of potential interference Another could be classical retrieval induced forgetting where L2 is stronger in the part of some of its brain and Just inhibits L3. It's not that it's stored in a different location but it's just stronger and it's More easily recalled because you have more practice and more proficiency L3 is new so it's a little harder to find that information because L2 is kind of bubbling up in your recall but Another one could have to do with frequency so the more frequent the word is the easier it is to remember and L2 may have a stronger effect Because it's not as Frequently used so it's coming to the top so L2 could interfere stronger because maybe it's not as Firmly cemented in your brain as L1 is and low-frequency L1 words could also be Interfering with the L3 recall The way the L2 words are because they're just not as firm in your head So those are some possible sources of interference Going on in this study in any case what you need to know is if you're learning the third language And you're learning it through a second language that could make it harder to remember Lexical items Accurately and quickly same goes for lower frequency words so the easiest words To learn in a language are going to or it should be according to the study Are going to be the more frequent ones because they aren't going to be facing as much competition from L1 words in recall That's the presentation. 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