The acquisition, attrition, and relearning of mission vocabulary

This chapter is an overview of research on the L2 vocabulary acquisition, attrition and relearning of LDS missionaries. The first section summarizes studies which used a common research design to examine both the learning and the loss of L2 vocabulary in three East Asian and three Indo-European languages by the English-speaking missionary population. In the second section, using a framework of the savings paradigm from cognitive psychology, an overview is given of our initial vocabulary relearning study (Hansen, McKinney & Umeda, 2000) , followed by findings from recent analyses of longitudinal data collected from a subset of the same returned missionaries a decade later (Hansen, Kim & Taura, 2010).