Resumen de Language attrition and reactivation in the context of bilingual first language acquisition
This paper reports on a case study of a child raised in the context of bilingual first-language acquisition in English and Bulgarian, where the latter represents a minority (heritage) language. Using diary data and spontaneous speech recordings, the study identifies a period of loss of production in Bulgarian (1;7–2;3) and a subsequent reactivation of the passive language facilitated by a brief change in input and social environment during a 10-day trip to Bulgaria. The data are analyzed in terms of proportion of utterances in each language, code-mixing, utterance length, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, choice of language in narrating stories, and parental discourse strategies. The results are discussed with regards to family socialization factors, including the one-parent, one-language model, and with regards to language attrition and language recovery phenomena. Overall, the study offers a renewed perspective on some long-standing challenges and opportunities associated with the acquisition and maintenance of a minority language, highlights the dynamic nature of childhood bilingualism, and demonstrates that continued input in a language that has become passive can be beneficial.
