Morphological attrition among Russians in Hungary

Abstract

Morphological attrition has received considerable attention in bilingualism and attrition studies. It has been confirmed by a number of studies that attrition weakens the grammatical coherence in the mind of the speaker and that monolingual controls usually outperform attriters in grammatical judgment tasks. However, to what extent extralinguistic variables can justify this difference remains a question. The present study focuses on the first language attrition of Russians living in Hungary, focusing on grammatical judgment. All participants (N = 50) have spent more than seven years in Hungary, and their age ranges from 22 to 72 years old. The study’s main aim was to investigate the degree of extralinguistic variables, such as age, language choice, contact and attitude, frequency of use, length of residence, interacting with L1 of individuals on their grammatical judgment. The future tense formation task was developed to elicit data on morphological attrition. Together, these results provide vital understanding of how attriters’ language production differs from monolinguals’ and the main factors contributing to language attrition. The present study’s findings correspond to the previous studies that the immigrant group did significantly worse in comparison with the control group. However, the current study failed to find the link between extralinguistic variables and morphological attrition in L1.