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

Fathman (1975) studied 200 children aged between 6 and 15 learning English
in America and found that 6-10 year-old learners did better in the acquisition of
the phonological system than older children and Flege (1987) found that
Spanish speaking children tended to produce the English ∕t∕ sound with
native-speaking properties whereas older speakers of Spanish found native-like
production of this sound problematic.

Oyama (1976) studied the acquisition of English accents by a group of 60
Italian immigrants into the USA with arrival ages of between six and 20 years
and different lengths of stay in the USA. He also found that age of arrival was a
strong predictor of degree of accent and that the effect of age was independent
of length of stay. Younger children acquired native-like accents whereas
children Olderthan 12 did not.

Snow & Hoefnagel-Hohle (1978) studied the acquisition of Dutch by English
native-speakers aged five to adults living in the Netherlands. They found only
small differences between the age groups in the rate of acquisition of the
phonological system of the Dutch language. Measuring discrimination of Dutch
speech sounds, they found that by nine to twelve months after their first
exposure to Dutch, those with the best pronunciation scores also did best on a
discrimination test of Dutch phonemic contrasts that do not occur in the English
language such as ∕uy∕ and ∕x∕. Discrimination performance improved up to
adolescence when 'the incidence of errors started to increase'.

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