Attrition in the Productive Lexicon of Two Portuguese Third Language Speakers

This study investigates loss of productive vocabulary in oral language, specifically in Portuguese as a third language for two English-Hebrew bilingual children, ages 9 and 13. The study investigated the lexical loss in Portuguese storytelling behavior after 1, 3, and 9 months of discontinued contact with the language. The analysis focused on the nature of the attrited productive lexicon, lexical production strategies used to compensate for forgotten vocabulary, and lexical retrieval processes during storytelling in Portuguese and in the children's two dominant languages. A significant decrease was found in the total number of words produced in the Portuguese stories of the two children after 9 months, both in comparison to word total in earlier months and in comparison to total words in English and Hebrew stories. There was greater attrition in the case of the younger subject after 9 months than in that of his older sister. He used a more limited number of different words, as well as fewer and shorter T-units per utterance, which was not the case with regard to his sister. He also attrited proportionately more nouns than words from other word classes. The subjects used at least six lexical production strategies in order to compensate for forgotten words—two of them L1-based (borrowing and foreignizing), and four of them intralingual (the use of a general word, approximation, circumlocution, and word abandonment). Their data also provided evidence of lexical retrieval processes. Examples of lexical production strategies and lexical retrieval processes are given.