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Abstract Abstract: In the field of syntactic attrition, foreign and domestic research has focused dominantly on receptive syntactic skills, and few empirical studies have been conducted to probe the attrition of productive syntactic structures so far. This study, on the basis of EFL learners' acquisition sequence in terms of English interrogative structures, is designed to investigate the attrition of Chinese adult EFL learners’ receptive and productive English interrogative structures by way of translation and grammaticality judgment. The results revealed that: 1) EFL learners’ attrition sequence of English interrogative structures, either receptive or productive ones, roughly reflected the inversed pattern of their acquisition sequence, which echoed Regression Hypothesis; 2) the attrition rate of productive English interrogative structures was significantly higher than that of receptive ones, suggesting that Regression was also manifested cross linguistic skills; 3) the syntactic items most vulnerable to attrition were generally characterized by a high activation threshold, a low frequency of use, high-ranking markedness as well as great complexity in structures and cognitive demands. Accordingly, these syntactic items should be activated and retrieved more frequently in language teaching. In addition, in developing language policy, decision-makers should make more efforts to improve teaching requirements and optimize evaluation systems of such productive tasks as speaking, translating and writing, to help students maintain the competence acquired.
Key words: English interrogative structures; attrition sequence; Regression Hypothesis; receptive skills; productive skills
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