John McWhorter, the linguist, says in his latest series that after age 15 the adult brain does not have the flexibility to learn a language to a native equivalency, and will always scruff it up somehow, which is how language change happens (one version at least).
Another linguist, Steven Krashen, however, seems to say that adults can speak a new language quite well, so long as they ‘acquire’ it instead of not just formally ‘learn’ it.
So which is it? What is the latest linguistics 101 on secondary language acquisition in adults? Impossible to ever be native level, or doable?
You can be fluent in a language that you learn as an adult, but it will be near impossible not to have a accent that is noticeable to native speakers. You might have perfect grammar, an encyclopedic vocabulary, but you will almost certainly not sound like a native speaker. A child, OTOH, can become fluent and have no detectable foreign accent with ease in just a few years.
I would offer you a cite from wikipedia, but, well, you know…
I watched a documentary that followed up on a Syrian family a year after they had been accepted in Quebec as refugees about a year and a half ago.
The mom was amazing. It showed her out shopping and speaking French with the shopkeepers, etc. Her French was far from perfect but after one year of being immersed in it she could get by. And the kid in grade one was pretty much fluent.
Children are good at learning languages because they have to be. Everyone needs to learn a language, and fairly quickly, if they’re going to get along in society. But once you’ve learned one, there’s much less urgency for learning others, so the ability diminishes at some point after the age where you’d need to learn the first one.
And adults most certainly don’t suck at acquiring languages. They’re amazing at it, as evidenced by the fact that they’re able to do it at all. Kids are just even more amazing. Learning languages is really, really hard.
If you need to speak it to survive, it can be amazing how quickly you can learn by being dropped off in another country where no one speaks your language.
I once worked with this guy who was a POW in Vietnam. He said within the first day, he learned what quite a few words meant and could repeat them just as they did if he had to. I imagine so in such situations.
Did they say she spoke no French prior to emigrating? A lot of educated Syrians would have studied French. Syria was part of the French Mandate after WWI, so it’s a commonly studied language there.
The brain starts to weed itself of “unneeded” connections after puberty, and we literally lose the ability to hear certain language sounds that we don’t grow up with. The evolutionary “why” is hard to say for certain, but it makes sense that children should be open to acquiring new knowledge but at some point adults need to focus and get shit done, not just play around.
You are born with the ability to hear multiple phonemes, but at an early age the ones you are surrounded with (i.e. that your parents speak) are strengthened, while other ones are pruned. There is evidence that children can distinguish certain sounds not in their (future) language until a certain age, then they have difficulty distinguishing similar ones.
You also have a greater ease at learning a language before a certain age; 17 is the most common number I’ve seen. I don’t agree that this means that an adult will never reach fluency, but it does mean that this becomes much more difficult, and many but not all people may not become fluent. And yes, an accent may be present.
Adults also may become less involved in the new culture, while the children (usually) have compulsory education.
And I don’t know about Syria (looks like universities are Arabic), but Lebanon has French language schools, the #3 and #4 universities are French. #1 and #2 are English.
Lebanon has maintained more of a tie to its Frenchified past than Syria has, but both were part of the French Mandate between the World Wars, so that prestige language still has some, well, prestige. But, as noted, it was stated that the woman in question did not speak French before arriving in Canada.
Ever notice that it’s also harder to learn sports as an adult than as a kid? Do you see many virtuosos of an instrument who didn’t start study as a child? Simple observation shows us that children have many behavioral differences as compared to adults, and those differences must have something to do with brain development.
I do not know that they suck, but remember as a child you literally have years to make sense of and master making sounds will become your language.
Years when the actually speaking of is of little importance.
As an adult, you kind of no longer have that luxury, adults cant go around babbling nonsense as they master a new way of moving the tongue to make a foreign sound.
It probably does not help that you have already learned a language that you speak and think in, and have learned the rules of and have become a bit stubborn about.
But adults do it every day.
As far as accents, i dont think it is impossible.
Perhaps it is just that adults are more self aware and children love to mimic and are not so self conscious.
Look at some actors and comedians who do all kinds of accents.
Necessity alone doesn’t seem to be the case. Young children who are exposed to multiple languages can learn to speak several languages fluently. There’s no obvious necessity to speak more than one. You can communicate with one language; everything after that is just convenience. And knowing multiple languages is just as convenient for adults as it would be for children. But adults can’t learn multiple languages with the same ease young children can.
Just a theory here but maybe it’s somehow easier to learn a language when you don’t know any languages. Toddlers start out not knowing any language. As they learn to talk, they’re learning a set of rules for how language works.
But if you or I tried to learn another language, we’re starting out already knowing at least one language. We already have a set of language rules in our mind. So we have to not only learn a new set of rules; we have to also learn to ignore our existing set of rules. In a sense, part of learning how to speak Mandarin is learning how to not speak English.
I’m just reporting what I learned from reading the literature. I’m not aware of anyone putting forth the idea that one language crowds out the other, especially since older children pick up languages faster and better than adults-- not just infants. There actually might be an advantage adults have in the very early stages of language acquisition, but kids overtake them pretty quickly. And the whole accent thing leans heavily towards kids. That is kids, not just infants. Your 9-year-old kid has a complete language ability in his native tongue, but still can beat out the adults when he has to pick up a 2nd language. There is something that is different about the way the brain works after puberty. It’s all those hormones and thinking about sex that crowds out language!
But you can easily raise a child bi- or tri-lingual, even if the languages are dramatically different. There may be some delay, but overall it leads to fluency in multiple languages at an early age. I don’t think there is any increased outcome for toddlers vs. young school age children AFAIK.
I did not learn Spanish until my mid 20’s. {I always avoided foreign language classes in high school and college}.
Well, after arriving in Ecuador and realizing that I would be there for 2+ years, I was sure kicking myself in the ass for not taking any Spanish classes when I had the chance
.
So to survive, I learned…
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The negative cite in the OP requires “native” to consider a learner successful. That term would need to be defined, but it’s pretty stupid as there are very few to no situations where something like having a foreign accent or making the occasional mistake regarding grammar or vocabulary would be a problem. After all, it’s not as if actual natives come without accents and with perfect grammar and perfect recall of the dictionary. Why do we expect more of someone speaking a language as their Nth than of someone who speaks it as their first is beyond me.
On another point, both the level to which someone will sound native and the speed at which someone learns correlate with how close previously-known languages are linked to the new one. I’ll always have somewhat of an accent in English (and one which changes with time depending on where have I been speaking English last), but Italian colleagues said my Italian sounded local to their ears after just a few weeks there.
But there are accent coaches out there. I’ve heard many actors learn an accent that is not their own, and do a great job. So it would seem to me that an adult can learn the correct phonemes and accent, but it takes specifically learning them. Though, of course, not everyone gets the same results from a dialect coach.
I do also know that children actually have trouble hearing sounds they can’t make. A child with a speech pathology where they can’t say /r/ sounds will often not be able to tell that it is a different sound than /w/. Once they are taught how to say it, though, they do learn. I wonder how much that carries to adults.
Finally, an anecdote. There is this German YouTuber I watch who has a definite German accent (although its gotten better). And she talks a lot about trying to get better at pronouncing things correctly. However, on one show, she deliberately did an American and British accent, and both sounded quite passable to me. I noticed a few flaws in the American accent that are probably also present in the British accent, but she was a lot closer.
But, despite talking about wanting to lose her accent, she doesn’t use those accents. I have often wondered why that is. This is what led me to wonder if a lot of people aren’t even really trying to have either accent. They just want to be clearly understood, and to soften their accent.
