The current researches on the foreign language vocabulary attrition mainly focuses on the nature, time and order of the attrition of foreign language vocabulary, but there are few experimental researches using new technological means. In this paper, students who are native Chinese speakers are taken as the subjects to conduct two behavioral experiments and event-related potential (ERP) experiments. The results show that subjects have the attrition of foreign language vocabulary. N1 and N400 effect are found in the results of the two experiments, in which both concrete nouns and abstract nouns show the weakening of N1 component and enhancing of the N400 component. In the trend of brain evoked potential, the amplitude of N1 becomes smaller while the amplitude of N400 becomes larger. These results indicate that foreign language vocabulary leave traces in the brain when it is extracted again, and English nouns appears attrition. As the most common word class in English, the attrition time of Chinese learners to this word class is short and the attrition even occurs within three months.

Attrition of Foreign Language Vocabulary, Vocabulary Training, Concrete / Abstract Nouns, ERPs, N1, N400