Investigating activation changes as driving (L1-) attrition

This thesis tested if changes in activation could be registered in non-attriters for aspects of Finnsih grammar that had been previously documented to attrite. These grammatical areas were the accusative/partitive split, accusative case-form split, and pragmatic V2 word order. In so doing, this thesis attempted to adjudicate whether the explicit and implicit assumptions that L1-attrition is connected to changes in activation were empirically founded. It was also tested whether the size of the linguistic unit (morphology versus word order) mattered, and whether semantic meaning for morphology played a role, since the accusative/partitive split contributes meaning in the form of aspect and telicity, while the case-forms within the accusative do not. This thesis tested these grammatical properties of Finnish in a cross-linguistic priming experiment with a group of Finnish native speakers that had grown up in Finland and immigrated as adults to the US, Canada, Australia, and Estonia and lived there for at least 8 years. The split in the societal language (English versus Estonian) was chosen to see if results were sensitive to linguistic proximity of the second language. Results from a priming study indicated that morphology indeed could change activation levels, but only as a function of within-language priming, if the morphology in question was not shared 1:1 in terms of forms and syntactic features between languages. This speaks for the validity of assuming that changes in activation are behind L1-attrition. However, results were found primairly in the English-Finnish group and only for the morphological phenomena. This was attributed to the word order task not inducing priming due to the absence of sufficient context making the V2 word order pragmatically salient. Absence of direct priming results in Estonian-Finnish speakers was interpreted to possibly be modulated by Estonian-Finnish speakers being within native control norms in their Finnish usage across domains and interlocutors. There were cumulative primnig results for the accusative case-form though, which also supported the notion that morphology might not be able to prime cross-linguistically, due to forms and syntactic features between languages not matching 1:1. Only in exceptional cases when this match is present (such as with the accusative case-forms) would we expect cross-linguistic priming to be possible; which is what the cumulative priming effects signal. Finally, a longitudinal case study with an attriter using the same methodology as above is also looked into, whether attrition, once it has set in, induced a change in the grammar. This was done by analysing if primes containing attrited (but for the speaker acceptable) morphology would prime this same attrited output equally as well as the usage of this same morphology in a structure where it was grammatical. The speaker was first tested in a cross-linguistic priming task where they were identified as an attriter by producing ungrammatical unmarked accusatives when only a partitive or marked accusative was expected. Analysis of the results showed that this attrited production often happened after prior production of a grammatical form of the unmarked accusative that was possible to be produced in one of the fillers. To see if this possibility for grammatical unmarked accusative primed attrited production, the speaker was tested again 18 months later with the same stimuli and order of items, with the sole exception that this time the fillers where grammatical unmarked accusative was possible to be produced were changed to make this impossible. Results indicated that the speaker’s attrition was undergoing grammaticalization, as prior grammatical usage of the morpheme primed better than attrited usage. This suggests that for the speaker attrition was most likely a problem of inhibiting the activated morphology in contexts where it would be ungrammatical. This suggests that L1-attrition is also best understood as an issue of access rather than changed representations.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Glodstaf, Walther

Contributors dc:contributor

• Montrul, Silvina Andrea
• Ionin, Tania
• Sprouse, Rex
• Talić, Aida

• L1-attrition
• Finnish
• Priming
• Activation

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Walther Glödstaf

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130079

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F130079