Foreign Language Attrition in Lexical Fluency and Richness Among Chinese College English Learners

The present study aimed to investigate the patterns and predictors of FL lexical attrition among Chinese college students. Participants were 17 non-English major undergraduates from a comprehensive university in Shandong, China, all native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. A longitudinal follow-up was conducted at four time points: immediately after the end of formal English instruction, and 3, 7, and 10 months thereafter. Data on participants’ free vocabulary output were collected via vocabulary fluency tests and two types of oral production tasks (topic speaking and film retelling tasks). Background questionnaires and vocabulary size tests were used to extract individual difference variables. A total of 340 transcribed texts were analyzed using lexical complexity software. Multivariate analysis of variance and linear regression revealed that: (1) lexical fluency declined at the second test point but partially recovered in the third and fourth tests; lexical density in oral production tasks did not differ significantly across time; certain lexical complexity indicators showed individual variation; lexical diversity significantly differed in topic speaking task but not in film retelling task; (2) initial vocabulary scores significantly predicted lexical fluency but did not directly predict lexical richness in either oral production task, and FL use showed no significant predictive effect on any lexical measures.