It is well established that verb-noun collocations are difficult for L2 learners, but little is known about the extent to which such collocations are vulnerable to attrition under conditions of reduced input. The study is novel in that we focus on L2 attrition rather than L1 attrition, and because we focus on Saudi Arabian returnees, who have so far hardly been studied. These are compared to child, adolescent and adult heritage speakers in the US. Receptive knowledge of English collocations was measured with a novel online acceptability judgement task and an online gap-filling task. We found that child returnees experienced more difficulties than the adolescent returnees, because the child returnees had not acquired collocations to the same extent as the adolescent returnees, and they experienced more crosslinguistic influence from Arabic. The current study also provides some counter evidence against the claim that every bilingual is an attriter.

The proactive gain control hypothesis suggests that the global language context regulates lexical access to the bilinguals’ languages during reading. Specifically, with increasing exposure to non-target language cues, bilinguals adjust the lexical activation to allow non-target language access from the earliest word recognition stages. Using the invisible boundary paradigm, we examined the flow of lexical activation in 50 proficient Russian-English bilinguals reading in their native Russian while the language context shifted from a monolingual to a bilingual environment. We gradually introduced non-target language cues (the language of experimenter and fillers) while also manipulating the type of word previews (identical, code-switches, unrelated code-switches, pseudowords). The results revealed the facilitatory reading effects of code-switches but only in the later lexical processing stages and these effects were independent of the global language context manipulation. The results are discussed from the perspective of limitations imposed by script differences on bilingual language control flexibility.