To advance our understanding of the vulnerability of native adult grammars to grammatical attrition, research should further explore the various input contexts in which such attrition may obtain. This article considers contexts where speakers are first exposed in adulthood to a grammatically distinct dialectal variety of their first language (L1), which may result in modifications to the grammar of their native dialect. Within psycholinguistic approaches to L1 attrition, these changes under the influence of a new L1 dialect are often considered part of the same phenomenon as attrition under the influence of a second language (L2). Changes to late-sequential bidialectals’ native dialects have also been investigated within variationist sociolinguistics under the term ‘long-term accommodation’. Despite the fact that both the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches are essentially studying the same patterns of native grammatical change in the same populations of speakers, communication between the two fields has been scarce. The purpose of this review article is therefore twofold: Firstly, we aim to provide an overview of some key studies evidencing changes in the native grammars of late-sequential bidialectals, bringing together research from the fields of L1 attrition and variationist sociolinguistics. Secondly, building on this review, we explore how drawing upon insights from these two fields can further our understanding of some key issues in the field of L1 grammatical attrition more broadly, and we explore some of the implications for current attempts to model grammatical attrition across a range of input contexts.
Baker et al. (Wed,) studied this question.