L’attrition de la première langue en tant que phénomène psycholinguistique

International audienceThis contribution presents an overview of current issues in language attrition research. The first section is concerned with terminological issues and the importance of distinguishing the phenomenon of attrition, which affects individual speakers, from societal processes of change, such as language shift and death. We then turn to the question of age at onset and the distinction between attrition and incomplete acquisition on the one hand, and attrition and bilingualism effects on the other. The second section of the paper presents insights into the attritional process from the perspective of neuropsycholinguistics. It is argued that the phenomena witnessed in the attritional process cannot be regarded as evidence of an erosion of underlying knowledge, but are more convincingly explained from the perspective of the activation and inhibition of that knowledge, with particular importance given to phenomena that concern lexical access and fluency in free speech