Acceso usuarios
Cristina Flores, Aldona Sopata, Esther Rinke
This study investigates the effects of environmental change on the childhood languages of Polish-German returnees. 22 bilinguals, who spent their childhood in Germany and later moved back to Poland, completed a detailed background questionnaire and took both the German and Polish versions of a vocabulary test (LexTALE). The study aims to detect potential processes of attrition in German, the former dominant language, and reinforcement of Polish, the former heritage language, by analyzing the impact of extralinguistic variables. The results indicate a leveling of language dominance in returnees which may be caused by decline of proficiency in German and increased proficiency in Polish. Proficiency in German and in Polish is predicted by age at return, with speakers who returned during childhood showing higher degrees of proficiency in Polish and lower proficiency in German, and by length of residence in Poland: longer length of residence back in the country of origin leads to higher lexical proficiency in Polish, but surprisingly also in German. This indicates that lexical knowledge continues to develop during the speakers’ lifetime, even in contexts of reduced language use.
