First Language Attrition: The Effects of Acculturation to the Host Culture

Participants, all university-level educated English speakers who have lived in Spain for at least 8 years, were administered a sociolinguistic questionnaire to measure their level of exposure to their L1 as well as their attitude towards their L1 and the L2. Also, they were administered three language tests: the first test consisted of a free speech story-telling test to analyze differences in discourse (lexical richness, syntactic complexity, hesitation patterns and code switching), the second test measured their lexical retrieval rate (implicit knowledge) and finally, the third test looked into lexical retrieval of specific words in specific contexts (explicit knowledge). The results are measured in terms of correlation analysis (using CLAN and SPSS) between the results of the linguistic tests and the participantś sociolinguistic habits. In turn, the latter are compared to the results of the control group in order to identify which acculturation phenomena have greater influence over L1 attrition.