The Demo Site

Why are small children better at achieving near-native pronunciation in a new language than young people and adults? There are various hypotheses - some more speculative than others. Let us look at a few of them.


Explained from a socio-psychological point of view, the identity of the adult is more firmly anchored than that of the child; therefore, the adult resists total socialisation, which includes the pronunciation patterns of the new language - seen in this hypothesis as an encroachment on the individual’s identity. For some people it is important to retain an accent precisely as part of a second-language identity.

The child’s mental boundaries are more flexible; therefore the child’s pronunciation is more susceptible to influence than that of the adult, is a further argument. On the basis of such an explanation it is also possible to understand why some adults achieve a much better pronunciation in the new language than others with the same native language: a greater capacity for empathy and therefore better preconditions for temporarily identifying oneself and placing one’s own identity on stand-by. (Larsen-Freeman & Long 1991: 163, 190).

Naturally, one must question why phonology of all things is affected so early on by social, psychological and affective conditions while other language areas are not - until later in life, at any rate. There is still a need for much research within this field of interpretation and, when it comes to it, socio-psychological hypotheses are difficult to test. They can easily appear to be adroit rationalizations after the event.

Some researchers believe that children are exposed to better input than adults - a more here-and-now-anchored and therefore more easily understandable language that is less complex and more limited. In other words, a delimited comprehensible language field to practice within. Moreover, children have better opportunities to play with language along with people of the same age, which gives them a great deal of phonological training. A pedagogical implication of this is that one must give pupils/students more opportunities to play with and train the language and make sure that this occurs within a delimited section of the language.

Neurobiologically based hypotheses

The neurobiologically based hypotheses are probably the best-researched to date when it comes to quality. They are based on neurophysiological relations concerning the neural plasticity of the brain - a field into which we are gaining ever greater insight thanks to technological advances.

According to Lenneberg (1967), who was among the first to advance hypotheses concerning the importance of age for language acquisition, the diminishing ability for language acquisition is related to how the various parts of the brain cooperate and with the lateralisation of the brain - i.e. with the gradual organisation of work functions to the right and left hemisphere of the brain. And most of this organisation is completed precisely around the age of 5-6.

The diminishing plasticity of the brain is today explained more precisely and combined with other brain changes, e.g. the speed at which the electrical impulses move round the brain. Here such substances as myelin have an important function, since the amount of this substance affects the conductivity of the nerve fibres (axons). The myelinisation process in the brain, which begins already at the embryo stage, plays generally speaking a highly central role in the development of general human functions - including language development.

 At as early an age as six months the child is able to distinguish adjacent sounds from each other; this means that a neural basis for the articulation of language sounds is formed at an early age. The nerve paths that are used to control the muscles used during the production of language sounds are encapsulated in myelin, which causes the nerve impulses to move faster. In that way, special high-speed nerve paths are formed to send signals to the muscles most often in use. Less important nerve paths where signals less often pass, do not get a layer of myelin and almost assume a kind of side-line function with low activity. In that way, a given functional pattern of articulatory movements is formed that causes certain pronunciation features to be promoted in some languages and to be absent in others. In Spanish, rounded front vowels such as /y/ are, for example, absent and therefore difficult to acquire in Danish; this is either compensated for by using the unrounded variant /i/ or the corresponding back vowel /u/. The movement patterns of the native language thus have a tendency to take over when acquiring the new language sounds.

It is now possible, via neurological experiments, to prove that as a general rule it would seem that the earlier a foreign or second language is learned, and the better it is spoken and understood, the more one can confirm that its representation in the brain overlaps that of the native language. The differences in representation among people regarding the foreign and second language are considerable - and far larger than in the representation of the native language. Examples have i.a. been seen of people where the native language was represented in the left-hand side of the brain while the foreign language was represented in the right-hand side (Gade 1998:.299). This could possibly indicate that the native language and the foreign or second language one masters well are activated from common areas in the brain.

The earlier, the better the neurophysiological conditions; the later, the less brain plasticity. The result: the earlier, the more near-native the pronunciation; the later, the greater variability among learners and the less change of a near-native pronunciation. There is much research to support this view. But it still remains to be proved that precisely puberty represents a demarcation line, as some research claims. Some results might seem to indicate that plasticity survives puberty and that learners up into their twenties still have the possibility to achieve near-native pronunciation. Neither, according to neurophysiological research, are there grounds for concluding that precisely puberty should be a particularly sensitive period.

Stable phonetic categories in the native language

Regarding the specially sensitive age of six, some researchers have, however, other explanations than the one that is based on the gradually diminishing plasticity of the brain. According to Flege (1992) and Bohn (e.g. Bohn & Flege: 1997), the lesser  degree of pronunciation success in young people and adults compared to children of 5-6 is due neither to changes in the perceptual and sensory-motor processes nor to a loss of neural plasticity. It is due to an importance shift in speech processing. At exactly the age of 5-6 the phonetic prototype categories and the boundaries between them are refined and stabilised, and there is a growing awareness in the child concerning segmental features in the language. Because the native language categories are established and stabilised, there is an increasing tendency for new sounds in the new language to be identified with the aid of the sound categories from one’s native language; this helps to prevent older learners from establishing phonetic categories for sounds where there are great similarities between the two languages and thus also to prevent them from producing these sounds.

According to this hypothesis, one is able throughout one’s life to establish new phonetic categories, but they have to be perceived by the learners as new and different enough, without too much overlap with sounds in the native language. If there is a great overlap, the learner - instead of establishing a completely new category - will classify the sound as the approximate sound in the native language. If, for example, one has aspirated /t/ in the native language and meets an unaspirated /t/ in the new language, one will categorise the new ‘t’ as aspirated. When in, for example, Danish one meets the very dense /i-e-±-æ-a-α/ distribution and perhaps only uses three of the degrees of opening in one’s native language, one will adapt the Danish degrees of opening to the sounds of one’s native language and, over time, perhaps adjust the sound towards the Danish one but never quite hit it. For the child, on the other hand, every sound in the new language is a new sound, and the child does not attempt to assimilate sounds to the native language. Every sound has its own category for the child, while the mental map from the native language is the ‘sounding board’ for the acquisition of foreign language sounds for the adult.

Flege and Bohn’s hypothesis has the advantage of both being able to take into account the sensitive age of around 5-6 as crucial for how close to the new language one gets and the fact that learners later on in life can achieve a high level of perfection in pronunciation when it comes to new sounds.
Even so, the hypothesis is unable to explain the fact that there can be that much variation among learners of the same age and with the same native language - this applies not only to adults but to children of the same age, too. Some researchers suggest that there may perhaps be differences in how finely tuned the hearing of the individual is, but once again we are within the realm of the speculative here, where motivational, psychological and personal factors may be possible explanations.

Some researchers claim that one can never achieve total native competence in two languages. Anne Cutler, via experimental psycholinguistic experiments, is able to show that one of the languages always dominates over the other in every person - even those that are thought to be totally bilingual. Using experiments with highly sensitive instruments she is able to demonstrate that in the meeting between languages with different prosodies - e.g. between English (or, for example, Danish), which uses stress patterns, and French, which has syllabic stress - one or the other of the types of stress will dominate in both languages.
By means of prosody we also express emotions and attitudes and, according to neurological investigations, we have a special functional area in the right hemisphere of the brain that deals with affective prosody. The fact that one constantly and unconsciously colours one’s language with attitudes and emotions when one speaks, only perhaps becomes really apparent when one encounters people with brain damage that has affected precisely this functional area. Their speech is felt to be monotonous, toneless and disinterested.

That prosody plays such a central role for interaction is something that one as a foreign or second language speaker is only too well aware of; here the basis lies for a large number of intercultural misunderstandings - among other things because we are not aware of precisely how and for what purpose we use prosody. Nor are we aware of the fact that people from different language areas have different prosodic conventions. English speakers, for example, use intonation patterns in order to underline their message. Danes use stress for this purpose, which is decoded by English speakers as anger and aggression. When Danes transfer their prosodic code to English, there is thus fertile ground for unpleasant misunderstandings!

The role of the native language

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.



brought to you by: