In the present study, we are interested in cases of foreign adoption. Individuals having undergone L1 attrition under such circumstances claim to have completely forgotten their L1 (Maury, 1999) and so any trace of L1 in childhood attriters can be expected to be rather subtle, maybe even unconscious. The methods required to reveal remnants of L1 in such subjects will therefore be quite different from those used to evaluate language in other cases of attrition.