A Critical Examination of the Beliefs about Learning a Foreign Language at Primary School

suggest that age-related constraints exist in the area of phonology and that
most young children are able to achieve native-like standards of pronunciation
while puberty marks the end of the capacity for accent-free speech. The
following pages will investigate some of these studies with the discussion of
studies from the classroom to follow.

Asher & Garcia (1969), Oyama (1976), Tahta et al. (1981) and Snow &
Hoefnagel-Hohle (1978) all reported a positive correlation between age of
arrival in a country and degree of 'foreign accent' suggesting that age of entry
into a country rather than length of stay is related to successful acquisition of
the phonological system of a se∞nd language. Asher & Garcia (1969) studied
the acquisition of English by Spanish-speaking Cubans and found that those
who had entered the USA between the ages of one and six achieved better
standards in pronunciation than those who arrived between the ages of 7 and
11 while those who arrived after the age of 13 showed the weakest
performance. The subjects in this study read aloud four sentences in English
which were tape-recorded and Subsequentlyjudged by English native-speakers.
While none of the immigrants were rated as having native accents those with an
age of arrival of one to 6 years performed best. Of those immigrants with an
arrival age of between 13 and 19 more than half were judged to have a definite
foreign accent. However, while about 2/3 of the Cubans who had come to the
United States aged six or under acquired near-native standards of
pronunciation, none of them acquired complete nativeness as judged by native
speakers while a number of older children seemed to have done so.

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