First-language decline in healthy aging: implications for attrition in bilingualism

Studies of language attrition have focused on the decline observed in individuals' first-language (L1) or second language (L2) in the context of bilingualism. L1 decline has also been extensively studied in monolingual adults in the context of healthy aging. One language domain that has been found to decline with age is lexical retrieval. This paper focuses on longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of healthy aging, which show that older adults, as compared to younger adults, demonstrate greater difficulty in performing naming tasks as well as accelerated decline in performance over time. Relevant findings of age-related decline in word retrieval and theories that have been proposed to account for it are summarized and their relations to the patterns and theories of lexical attrition reported for bilingual speakers are discussed. It is concluded that despite fundamental differences between these two circumstances of attrition, applying methods and theories from one study area to the other can be beneficial for understanding processes of language attrition. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.