Professor’s new book examines language loss among multilingual speakers

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State Professor of German and Linguistics Michael Putnam has spent a good part of his career thinking about language attrition, or “language loss,” among bi- and multilingual speakers. Now, it’s the basis of his latest book.

Putnam and David Natvig, associate professor of Nordic linguistics at the University of Stavanger in Norway, are the authors of the new book, “An Introduction to Language Attrition: Linguistic, Social, and Cognitive Perspectives.”

Published by Routledge, the book provides readers with a forward-looking overview of the diverse body of research examining why speakers of two or more languages can undergo a loss of proficiency in their first or additional languages. It’s geared to advanced students and researchers of theoretical and applied linguistics, bilingualism and heritage linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, education and various other fields, according to Putnam, director of graduate studies in the College of the Liberal Arts’ Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature, director of the Program in Linguistics, associate director of the Center for Language Science and director of the Max Kade German-American Research Institute.

Putnam said language attrition has been researched for years, but predominantly from the perspective of pathological conditions like stroke or aphasia.

“The point of this book is two-fold,” he said. “First, to highlight that research of ‘language loss’ also occurs in non-pathological settings. Second, to better understand what's going on here, my co-author and I demonstrate that a multifaceted approach is necessary.”

That approach, Putnam said, would take into account “social settings, lexical and grammatical constraints, and cognitive processing of information,” the three strands of language attrition that he and Natvig explore in-depth in the book. Progress has been made in these three areas, he said, but the research has largely been carried out in silos separate from one another.

Those researching language loss from a socio-linguistic perspective look at how a second language begins to encroach on a first language in a specific social domain.

“For instance, you emigrate to a country and the language of the home and the neighborhood and the church community is going to remain the language you came with,” Putnam said. “But the workplace, the school, the newspapers, the television, the radio — over time you’re going to have more of these types of settings where you’re not going to be able to use the first language and the second language is omnipresent. Eventually, more and more elements of the second language creep in.”

Then there are scholars like Putnam who specialize in a language’s structural properties.

“The effects of that are not completely uniform across the board,” he said. “Sounds systems, i.e. phonology, and sentence structure, i.e. syntax, are much less vulnerable to attrition compared to morphology, i.e. the way words are built, and lexicon, i.e. the way words are stored in short and long memory. That to me was surprising. Why is that? What does that tell us about the way language is represented in the mind?”

Meanwhile, cognitive neuroscience researchers have in recent years made strides of their own with language loss. They’re examining how attrition is occurring “in real time and milliseconds” using eye tracking and brain waves, said Putnam, who in January will become the new co-editor of Language, the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America.

“What they’re starting to see, which is fascinating, is that at the millisecond level, there seems to be a change in processing when language attrition is occurring,” he said. “There seem to be certain electric spikes when a native speaker encounters a lexical item that’s surprising, like, for instance, ‘I like to drink my coffee with socks.’ You see a spike with the verb ending. With people undergoing attrition, you see they don’t have the same level of the spike. It’s happening at a subconscious level. These folks are showing the beginning of what attrition might be.”

While attrition is very real, it doesn’t mean that the person is outright losing their ability to speak the language in question, Putnam said. Rather, it’s that they just couldn’t actively retrieve what they needed in the moment, or they were eventually able to but with some difficulty. 

The hope moving forward is to integrate all three of these strands into a multipronged approach to combating language loss, Putnam said.

“Why don’t we just try to talk about language attrition as a phenomenon of the dynamic life of bilinguals and multilinguals, and in this state, things are unstable, but what happens to get the system to stabilize again?” Putnam said. “How much time do we need for various elements of grammar to be restabilized and get things relearned? These are the questions that should be asked. If we know more about attrition, what’s the fast track to get people back there? Because if we knew more, it could be a better return on investment.”

Indeed, this more unified approach could have an important societal impact, shape independent and collaborative research, and improve pedagogy, Putnam said.

He’s confident he and other Penn State faculty members will play a big role in carrying out this work.

“This stands to have a cost-benefit analysis for students who invest time — and money — in learning languages,” Putnam said. “We stand to learn more about what's more readily retained longer and what might be more vulnerable to loss and decay over time. And this research will continue to focus on heritage and endangered languages, aiding students and researchers alike in efforts to retain and preserve them.”