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

Snow concluded that evidence on the acquisition of accents 'may be the best (if
not the only) evidence of a sensitive period for language'.

Contradictory evidence, however, suggesting that adults and adolescents
perform better than children was produced by Olson & Samules (1973),
Ervin-Tripp (1974) Neufeld (1979), Snow (1987), Bongaerts, Planken & Schils
(1995) and Bongaerts, van Summeren, Planken & Schils (1997).

Ervin-Tripp (1974) studied the acquisition of French by 31 English-speaking
American children aged four to nine living in Geneva, Switzerland. The children
were from socially advantaged, professional backgrounds and received their
education through the medium of French. She found that the older children
acquired the phonological system faster than the younger children, a finding
consistent with the study by Olson & Samuels (1973). Snow (1987) suggested
that acquisition of the Dutch phonological system outside the critical period,
especially after phonological training, was indeed possible while an earlier study
by Neufeld (1979) and a more recent study by Bongaerts, Planken & Schils
(1995) also provide data in support of successful acquisition of the phonological
system of a second language outside the critical period. In Neufeld's laboratory
study twenty Canadian university students received 18 hours intensive tuition in
Chinese and Japanese phonology and were tested in their ability to repeat
sentences in each language. About half the subjects were rated as
native-speakers of Japanese and just under half as native speakers of Chinese
leading Neufeld to the conclusion that phonological native-speaker competence
is achievable at least by some adult learners.

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