L1 Lexical Attrition of Indonesian Migrant Workers in Taiwan

• Main Author: F. Ari Anggraini
• Other Authors: Dr. Michael Tanangkingsing
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/frtrv5

碩士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 應用英文系碩士班 === 104 === This study examined L1 lexical attrition among Indonesian migrant workers who speak Javanese in Taiwan. It was aimed to investigate whether Javanese speaking migrant workers who have been living in Taiwan for more than 7 years experienced attrition in their first language. This study was based on the assumption that vast exposure to Mandarin language community for a long period of time brought Indonesian migrant workers, particularly Javanese speaking migrant workers, to experience attrition in their L1. Therefore, this study also investigated the effect of L2 use on L1 lexical performance of Indonesian migrant workers in Taiwan. The data were collected through body part picture naming and storytelling tasks to collect information of migrant worker lexical performance on Javanese. Besides, to get information of the amount of L2 use and exposure, a sociolinguistic and personal background questionnaire was also administered. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were employed to get comprehensive findings. The independent t-test results reveal that the Indonesian Javanese-speaking migrant workers showed significantly lower performance in retrieving the high frequency items with p = .035 and low frequency items with p = .003. In terms of lexical diversity, the results show that there is no significant difference in performance between the migrant group and the control group. Moreover, the results also show that there is significant difference frequency of pauses per 100 words between the migrant group and the control group, wherein p value is .001. A highly significant difference in the production of repetitions in the migrant and control groups’ narration is also found. The migrant group significantly produced more repetitions than the control group, wherein p value is .029. The sociolinguistic questionnaire results show that there is almost no significant difference in the use of the Mandarin language and the Javanese language by the Indonesian Javanese-speaking migrant workers in the present study. The only significant difference use between Mandarin and Javanese is only found in the non-interactive language use, where the migrant group significantly used Mandarin more frequently than Javanese, wherein p value is .001. Furthermore, the Pearson’s correlation results also demonstrate that the Mandarin (the interactive use) positively correlates with the migrant group’s disfluency marker production, r value is +.719. On the other hand, negative correlations between the use of Javanese in different context use with the response times on the body-part naming task is revealed by the significance analyses: Javanese (non-interactive use) negatively correlates with the high-frequency response times (r = -.622); Javanese (interactive use) negatively correlates with the high-frequency response times (r = -.576); and Javanese (interactive use) negatively correlates with the medium-frequency response times (r = -. 550). In summary, significantly different performance is only found in terms of retrieving low frequency words and higher number of disfluency production. The Javanese-speaking migrant workers appear to retain the Javanese language, particularly in the non-interactive use.