French–German late bilingualism – an attrition study of lexical and semantic items.

This study examines the phenomenon of attrition of German adults living in an L2 environment. Recent studies have revealed the selective and ordered character of arising attrition. Our reference frame permits us to hypothesize a modular organization of languages (Fodor, on 1983; paradise, on 1997) with a hierarchic treatment (’data-/concept-driven’: Durgunoglu & Roedinger, 1987). This hypothesis is notably based on a model of oral production (Levelt, on 1989) that has been later adapted to comprehension by De Bot (1992). The aims of our study are to differentiate the vulnerability of different linguistic levels, in order to reveal the organization of both languages in the paradigm of natural reading (= modality of perception of written stimuli) and to test whether the hypothesis of temporally inhibited access (Paradise, 1985, 1993, etc) or the hypothesis of reorganization in a highly dynamic system (e.g. Pavlenko, 2000) fits better to our results.
In order to reveal an eventual attrition, we measured eye-movements of the participants in relation to French-German interferences on lexical, morphological and semantic levels by using an eye-tracking system, which is a non-interfering psycho-physiological method. The dichotomy between high and low processing proved to be important to understand different eye-fixation indications.
Longer initial fixations for sentences containing interferences reflect the detection of an anomaly. The higher probability and length of eye-refixations for morphological and semantic interferences seems to prove the implication of high level (concept-driven) processing. Thus, Levelt’s model (1989) which classifies morphological and phonological items on the level of lexemes cannot be supported.