Research & Projects

Photo by the creator, taken in Edinburgh

Do learners experience attrition in a previously acquired foreign language during the acquisition of a new one? Can the attrition effects be fully accounted for by acquiring the new language? What extralinguistic factors may have played a part in the process?

Products

Yang, L. When L3 gains are not enough: L2 English attrition and learner profiles in L3 Japanese Acquisition. Oral presentation (accepted), The 14th International Conference on Third Language Acquisition and Multilingualism. Poznań, Poland. September 3-5, 2026.

Yang, L. & Li, Q. Foreign language attrition in English among L1 Chinese-L2 English-L3 Japanese students. Poster presentation (virtual) at The 22nd International Conference of the Japan Second Language Association (J-SLA). Tokyo, Japan, October 22-23, 2022.         

Photo by the creator, taken in Bloomington

What happens to learners' command of a foreign language after study abroad? Do they experience attrition or show robust maintenance of the language? What leads to attrition effects and what helps with maintenance?

Products

Yang, L.  Syntactic complexity development during and post-study abroad: a learner-corpus-based study. Poster presentation. The 26th International Annual Conference of the Japan Second Language Association, Tsu, Mie, Japan, July 4-5, 2026.

Yang, L. Tracing Lexical Attrition Trajectories of Japanese as a Foreign Language: A Case-Series Study. Selected talk at Language Attrition Network (LAN). Virtual. May 8, 2026.

Yang, L. Rethinking Vocabulary Attrition: Time-Window Analysis of Productive Vocabulary and Assessment of Frequency-Controlled Receptive Vocabulary in Japanese after Study Abroad. Poster presentation, Bilingualism Matters Symposium (BMS) 2026. Milan, Italy. April 28-30, 2026.  

Yang, L. Attrition or retention? A longitudinal study of Japanese among native English speakers post-study abroad. Poster presentation, American Association for Applied Linguistics 2026 Conference (AAAL 2026). Chicago, IL, US. March 21-24, 2026.  

Photo by the creator, taken in Xiamen

How does learners' lexical diversity change over time? From a global and local perspective, do we see a consistent picture? I run inquiries with data from Japanese learner corpora developed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. 

Products

Yang, L. Navigating intricacy in lexical diversity measurement: A longitudinal learner corpus-based analysis of spoken L2 Japanese. Oral presentation (accepted), Learner Corpus Research Conference 2026, Prague, Czech Republic. September 17-19, 2026.

Yang, L. 日本語学習者の語彙発達―語彙多様性に注目して [Lexical development in Japanese learners-Focusing on lexical diversity], Linguistic Festival 2026, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Virtual, February 14, 2026.

Photo by the creator, taken in Kyoto

What do learner corpora tell us about the development of learner errors? I examine the distribution of -ideshita as a learner error across predicate categories and modalities in order to provide pedagogical implications.

Product

Yang, L. Beyond adjectives: A corpus-based investigation of -ideshita overgeneralization. Oral presentation (accepted), The 33rd Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference. Champaign, IL, US. August 6–9, 2026.