Paying attention to verb-noun collocations among returnees and heritage speakers: how vulnerable are L2 English collocations to attrition?

Alraddadi, H. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7473-2689, Aveledo, F. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7736-1600, Hangelbroek, R. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0442-5378 and Treffers-Daller, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6575-6736 (2025) Paying attention to verb-noun collocations among returnees and heritage speakers: how vulnerable are L2 English collocations to attrition? Bilingualism Language and Cognition, 28 (2). pp. 563-576. ISSN 1366-7289 doi: 10.1017/S1366728924000610

Abstract/Summary

It is well established that verb-noun collocations are difficult for L2 learners, but little is known about the extent to which such collocations are vulnerable to attrition under conditions of reduced input. The study is novel in that we focus on L2 attrition rather than L1 attrition, and because we focus on Saudi Arabian returnees, who have so far hardly been studied. These are compared to child, adolescent and adult heritage speakers in the US. Receptive knowledge of English collocations was measured with a novel online acceptability judgement task and an online gap-filling task. We found that child returnees experienced more difficulties than the adolescent returnees, because the child returnees had not acquired collocations to the same extent as the adolescent returnees, and they experienced more crosslinguistic influence from Arabic. The current study also provides some counter evidence against the claim that every bilingual is an attriter.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/120315
Identification Number/DOI	10.1017/S1366728924000610
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > English Language and Applied Linguistics
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
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