Fluency and language attrition

Speakers who live in an L2 environment for an extended period of time often experience change in the way in which they use their L1, a process referred to as L1 attrition. The present article provides an overview of language attrition phenomena at various linguistic levels. However, attrition cannot be trivially or linearly related to factors such as the frequency of use of the L1. It is argued here that attrition phenomena are not the outcome of a change to the underlying linguistic system nor of access problems due to an increase in activation thresholds, but of crosslinguistic influence in online speech production. One of the most fundamental and most interesting characteristics of linguistic data of any kind is its inherent variability. Even mature, monolingual native speakers will usually not perform according to the 'target standard ' one hundred percent of the time. In free spoken data, there are slips of the tongue, grammatical errors, variance in pronunciation and so on. Any kind of formal test on which all participants achieve the maximum score can be deemed to show a ceiling effect due to being too simple. In this context, it is interesting to ask what factors will have an impact on this variance, and in what way. If there are distracting factors, skills that rely on procedural memory and are therefore largely automatic, such as grammar o