2009/03/12

Flege, J. M., Frieda, E. M., Nozawa, T. (1997). Amount of native-language use affects the pronunciation of an L2. Journal of Phonetics, 25, 169–186.

Presentation: Sally

Summary: Angela

In many studies of L2 learning, the issue of age of acquisition has been widely discussed. Particularly, many studies have attempted to test the validity of the Critical Period Hypothesis. While it has already been testified that there is no definite upper age limit for L2 learning, people still widely believe that the younger one learns L2, the less accent one will have. Research has also found that L1 and L2 mutually influence each other. To test the validity of these claims, the authors asked Italian-English bilinguals who were controlled for their age of arrival in Canada (all before puberty), but differ in the degree of their L1 use to produced English sentences for native American and Canadian speakers to judge. If early L2 learners do not have any foreign accent regardless of the frequency of their L1 use, the Critical Period Hypothesis may still withstand some criticism and the effect of L1 on L2 may not be as strong as expected. While results of the foreign accent rating showed that the group of Italian-English bilinguals who had low use of L1 were rated to have less accent than that of the high use group, which may indicate an influence of L1 on L2, the group of Italian-English bilinguals who had low use of L1 was nonetheless rated as having detectable accent compared with native speakers. It was therefore proved that the Critical Period Hypothesis may not withstand as L2 learners who had early acquisition still had foreign accent and that factors other than age of acquisition were also influential.