| Language attrition is getting more attention of linguisticians at home and abroadsince1980. Vocabulary attrition, especially foreign language vocabulary attrition,becomes one of the hot issues in the study of language attrition. At present, theresearchers mainly focus on the questions of foreign language vocabulary attrition’sessence, time and order, etc; the primary research results can be quite different, and theexperimental study.of new advanced technology is also very little.Based on these, our study takes the college student of Chinese native-speaker assubjects, then starts from the reality of Chinese student’s English learning, and takesexample by contemporary linguistic study; after selects appropriate English corpus, wefirstly practice vocabulary training of English concrete and abstract nouns, andsubsequently make two behavioral and ERP experiments with the time interval of twomonths, and the aim is to observe the behavioral and electrophysiological mechanism offoreign language vocabulary attrition, and then explore its essence, time, order, and soon. Meanwhile, the relationship between foreign language vocabulary attrition and thecognitive abilities of learning and memory is preliminary discussed.The research conclusions show that, foreign language vocabulary attrition doesoccur on the subjects in two months. In the first and second experiments, the subjectsmake more mistakes and response time prolonged of concrete and abstract nouns, andthere is the obvious difference between the electrophysiological quotas. The effect ofN1and N400can be found in the experiments, and both of two classes of nouns clearlyshow that the component of N1drops off and N400builds up. N1becomes small andN400gets larger in electrical trend. These results make it clear that it leaves traces whenforeign language vocabulary is accessed, and the attrition of English nouns happens; asthe most common parts of speech in English, Chinese students have the shorter time ofattrition for nouns, and even less than three months. English nouns’ attrition of Chinese native-speaker present the feature of regression from the accuracy and response of twobehavioral experiments and the size of amplitude of N1and N400in ERP experiments.Concrete nouns are not only the result of acquisition is better than abstract nouns, butalso the degree of attrition is much less than abstract nouns, and the results apply to theJakobson’s regression hypothesis. According to the waveform changes of N400inexperiments, foreign language vocabulary attrition relates to the cognitive abilities oflearning and memory, it may be the anti-process of its acquisition, and forgetting playsan important role in foreign language vocabulary attrition. |
