Well, you may have read several posts on the impact which major life changes can have on the languages of bilinguals. Events like changing schools or employment, moving to another region or country or losing a close family member with whom a language was used exclusively may lead to change in the relative importance of languages which are used.
In case you define “knowledge” to be the deeply rooted fundamental structure of the language which let you produce and understand it in the first place and “use” as any concrete instance of it such as an individual utterance, language attrition usually affect mainly “use”.
At times, people do develop a foreign accent in their native language, they make occasional grammatical mistakes and they become less fluent and use a less diverse vocabulary. Generally, they can still speak and understand the language with more effort or difficulty.
Do in adult bilinguals as opposed to bilingual children; the atrophy of language knowledge of the first language is less?
It’s usually the case with speakers who lived in an environment where their first language (L1) is spoken as one of the majority languages until the age of 12 and then it’s a change in their language situation. Remember, there are many signs which show that this age can appear to be as a turning point.
Before this age, language knowledge is highly vulnerable even when a child appears to using a language in the same way as other native children belonging to the same age group. It’s obvious that children can and do lose such language almost completely when they don’t use it.
The first thing that most people experience is lack of frequency. Some attire tends to fumble for words an awful experience most of the times. Specifically, when one of their languages has a word that could credibly belong to the other language. It’s the same what people who learn a second language experience.
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