The Role Of Origin In Lexical Attrition Of Japanese As A Second Foreign Language: An Empirical Study Of Foreign Linguistics And English Literature Graduates

Vocabulary is an important language element and supposed to attrite easily. Sincethe publication of a volume by the name of “Attrition of Language Skills” in1992(Lambert and Freed1982), vocabulary attrition becomes the focus of languageattrition studies. A substantial amount of studies begin to systematically investigatethe nature of attrition, the factors that might affect attrition, the conditions underwhich attrition occurs, the reasons why it takes place, the way how it happens andwhat in a language suffers attrition. Thirty years later, researches on language attritionhave won increasingly attention and thus generated fruitful results.Compared with the prosperous situation abroad, systematic empirical study ofvocabulary attrition is a relatively unexplored area in China. Meanwhile, much moreis known about the acquisition of Japanese vocabulary than is known about itsattrition. Many researchers have been studied Japanese lexical acquisition from a widerange of dimensions in China. Few studies are conducted under the subject ofJapanese language attrition, let alone the related empirical studies of Japanese lexicalattrition research, no matter as L2or L3.This research, aimed to investigate lexical attrition of participants after threemonths of disuse, with particular emphasis on the impact of word origin on lexicalattrition, endeavors to answer the following four questions:(1) whether attritionoccurs on Foreign Linguistic and English Literature graduates after certain period ofdisuse?(2) Are words from different origins affected by attrition to the same degree?(3) Is the rate of meaning attrition related to the word origin and if so, to what degree?(4) Is the rate of pronunciation attrition influenced by word origin and if so, to what degree?The subjects investigated in this study are33foreign linguistic and literaturepostgraduate students who have learned English as their first foreign language andJapanese as their second foreign language. The instruments adopted are learningbackground information questionnaire and a vocabulary test composed of90items.The time interval of attrition in the study is three months.The analysis of the subjects’ scores on both the test and the questionnaire, withSPSS17.0as the analytical tool, indicates the following:(1) With regard to actualityof attrition, the Japanese vocabulary of the linguistics and literature graduates hasundergone severe attrition.(2) Words from different origin suffer from differentdegrees of attrition.(3) As regards the attrition of lexical meaning, the presentresearch suggests that attrition of Japanese vocabulary learned in Chinese contextechoes with interference theory.(4) As regards the attrition of lexical pronunciation,the present research suggests that the attrition of Japanese lexical knowledge isconsidered to be a complementary verification of the theory of “best learned, lastforgotten”. Prolonged sound, voiced sound or voiceless sound and glottal stop are thefeatures that mainly cause pronunciation recognition confusion and result in retrievalfailure.The author is interested in helping Japanese learners in China immune to theerosion of time or at least to slow down its attrition rate. A better understanding of theorigin effects on the lexical attrition of Japanese vocabulary as a second foreignlanguage would be economical to help learners to learn the vocabulary in a way thatcould make the lexical knowledge resistant to attrition.