Stages in the Attrition of English Passives

Abstract

A longitudinal study of two Korean sisters who returned to Korea after living in the U.S. for two years shows how English attrition can affect their use of passive construction. A comprehension task and a production task were used to collect data from these children for more than three years. The results show that when attrition strikes, production is likely to be affected before comprehension because their ability to understand English passives did not show signs of attrition while production was affected, which supports the regression hypothesis that suggests the path of attrition is the mirror image of the path of acquisition. Then, close examination of the younger sister's results demonstrated that attrition in production can go through some stages. The earliest signs of attrition in passives are producing various errors that did not occur when she was proficient. After that stage, she started avoiding passives, substituting her answers with actives.