Abstract
The poster summarizes results of a lexical decision task aimed at how Slovaks who sojourn long-term in Czechia process Czech and Slovak words. Thus, the study addresses the issue of L1 attrition and L2 acquisition in the situation of two closely related languages.
This topic has been not extensively investigated in the context of this research agenda. Moreover, lexical decision task has not been employed in L1 attrition studies so far.
The investigation therefore offers a new look at established and hotly debated topics. Two groups of Slovaks took part in the experiment: a control group of Slovaks living in Slovakia (n = 50) and an experimental group of Slovaks in Prague (n = 66).
Apart from that, 49 Czechs living in Czechia served as another control group. They carried out only the task containing Czech stimuli.
The stimuli in both sets (the set of Slovak words and the set of Czech words) comprised two types of words: identical cognates and non-cognates. The results have revealed that both groups of Slovaks responded faster to Slovak non-cognates than to respective Czech words.
Reaction times on Czech non-cognates were the slowest. Signs of L1 attrition have been detected.
The explanation of results is provided and it takes into account also sociodemographic characteristics of participants, such as the length of the residence in Czechia and the amount of the use of Czech and Slovak - pieces of information which were collected via special sociolinguistic questionnaires.