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Flege’s hypothesis places the traditional native-language-based explanations in a new light. Firstly, though, I would like to stress the following:

1) As with other aspects of language acquisition, it must apply that the more overlap between the native language and the new language, the fewer learning assignments for the learner. What is identical simply does not have to be relearned.
2) As with all other aspects of language acquisition, it must also apply that the more differences there are between the native language and the new language, the more learning assignments there are, and the longer time one must expect the learning to last.

A Vietnamese thus has a greater learning assignment when it comes to Danish as a new language than a German or a Dutchman, who can build on the many similarities between their native languages and Danish.
When beginning to acquire the new language, the learner generally tries to employ existing phonological categories from the native language - as we can also see within all other language areas. In the course of the ensuing learning process, an attempt is made to get the sounds to approach those of the new language; the greater experience with the language influences both the perception of the sounds and their production.
Unlike a traditional contrastive conception, where everything that is different is claimed to be what is difficult to learn, we arrive, according to Flege’s hypothesis, at a set of theories according to which one is perfectly well able to learn completely new sounds to perfection throughout one’s life, whereas sounds in the new language that resemble and have many shared features with sounds in the native language are extremely difficult to acquire after the age of 5-6. These sounds are made to fit the native language categorisation
It is precisely these native-language-based sound adaptations we register as an accent. The greater the overlap that exists between the sounds of the two languages, the more difficult it is to tune one’s pronunciation completely to the sounds of the new language. This has been investigated for both vowels and consonants.
Some investigations also show that the position of a sound is by no means irrelevant (Eckman 1977, 1985). German speakers, who do not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced final consonants (e.g. /b/ and /d/ as both voiced and unvoiced) have trouble in acquiring this distinction in final position in English, whereas they have no trouble in making this distinction initially and medially as this is a feature of German. For Koreans, who do not have this voicing contrast in initial, medial or final position in their native language, the prediction is that it will be hardest for them to acquire the contrast between voiced and unvoiced consonant finally, then medially, and, least difficult, initially. A hypothesis for the Danes’ struggle with the voiced stops in English would be that we find it more difficult to acquire the voiced final stop in English than the voiced initial stop in German and English.

Why is pronunciation, of all things, affected so early?

Another question to muse over is why pronunciation, of all things, it so difficult to acquire. One possible answer could perhaps be sought in what it is all about - the phonetic system.

If we have a sixth sense, it must be one of phonetic perception, as the brain researcher Anders Gade says. Phonemes are not separated by pauses when we hear them, and if our conversation partner speaks rapidly, we pick up 15 different phonemes a second. They are packed into a continuous stream of sounds, which we unpack and decode (Gade 1997:264). In terms of production, it calls for incredibly precise articulation work, not only for an individual organ but one that consists of a combination of articulatory movements carried out more or less simultaneously, where a selection is made among the approximately 100 cooperating muscles that make up the speech apparatus. This calls for motor control that is unrivalled in any other form of movement. With 15 phonemes a second, we are down to under 100 milliseconds a phoneme!
Sound reception and production thus require supremely efficient cognitive processes - in the case of reception, the hearer is engaged in both decoding and guessing; in production, the speaker is engaged in anticipatory planning.

Finally, pronunciation is the only aspect of language that calls for a close interaction between the cognitive and physiological processes. In acquiring new sounds we are also dealing with a complex re-organising of the articulatory processes.

We can state that age is not a matter of discussion in the research conducted so far as regards the acquisition of pronunciation. If one begins to learn a new language later than 5-6, one will seldom attain a near-native pronunciation of the foreign or second language.
The explanations for this are legion; those best-tested are neurobiologically based, where among other things the myelinisation process and the speed of the nerve impulses in the brain are considered to be of vital importance for the capacity to learn. The complex articulatory process that is part of pronunciation also helps to explain why pronunciation is that aspect of language which is particularly exposed to the influence of age.
Research also agrees that the native language plays a central role in precisely the acquisition of pronunciation in a new language. But whereas the prevalent view was that it was the new sounds in the target language that were the most difficult or impossible to acquire, new research would seem to indicate that it is in particular the sounds that are close to the native language that are the most difficult to acquire, both because the native language resembles a filter through which one hears the sounds of the new language and because the complex articulatory patterns in the native language predominate and are hard to modify. On the other hand, it is possible - according to these theories - to learn new sounds throughout one’s life. If sounds are not classified on the basis of the sound rules of the native language, there is in fact the basis for the construction of new phonetic categories.

This may also provide an answer as to why so few Danes learn such close languages as Norwegian and Swedish faultlessly - and why most of us retain throughout our lives traces of our regional variant of the Danish language.

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