Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, María Luisa García Lecumberri,& Jasone Cenoz Iragui
Degree of foreign accent and age of onset in formal school instruction: 1
Degree of foreign accent and age of onset in
formal school instruction
Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, University of the Basque Country
María Luisa García Lecumberri, University of the Basque Country
Jasone Cenoz Iragui, University of the Basque Country
1. INTRODUCTION
Age of onset of second language (L2) learning has been considered one of the main
predictors of degree of foreign accent (FA). Scovel (1969) reported on the inability of
late language learners to acquire a foreign language (FL) without FA, positing the
existence of a critical period (CP) beyond which the likelihood of achieving native-like
pronunciation decreases. Some researchers believe CP ends at puberty (Scovel, 1969),
while others place its end earlier, coinciding with the completion of native language (NL)
phonetic acquisition at about age 6 (Flege, 1991). However, several studies have
contested this view, suggesting that existing evidence does not support either the fact
that younger learners always acquire L2 phonology better (Singleton & Ryan 2004) nor
that acquisition is always accent free before the CP and accented after (Piske et al.
2001). In fact, some experiments have shown that early FL learners fail to attain accentfree pronunciation (Flege et al., 1997) whereas others have demonstrated that even
post-pubertal FL learners can attain native-like levels of phonetic proficiency (Bongaerts,
1999). Besides, formal instruction research does not associate early FL exposure with
better pronunciation or phonological perception (García Lecumberri & Gallardo del
Puerto, 2003), due to limited exposure (Singleton & Ryan, 2004). The present study
further investigates the relationship between onset age and FA in a formal learning
environment by means of FA judgments.
2. METHODOLOGY
60 Basque and Spanish bilingual speakers were analyzed. They studied English as a FL
at school. None of them received extra-curricular exposure to English. They were
divided into three different groups according to their English onset/testing age, as table
1 shows.
Group 1 (N=20)
Group 2 (N=20)
Group 3 (N=20)
ONSET AGE
TESTING AGE
4
10
8
14
11
17
Table 1: Characteristics of the sample
EXPOSURE
6 years
6 years
6 years
Four different instruments were employed in order to analyse learners’ degree of FA in
English. Participants were required to (1) narrate a story, (2) read some sentences, (3)
imitate some sentences and (4) read/listen-and-repeat some words in English. The
narration consisted of the well-known picture story ‘Frog, where are you?’ (Mayer,
1969). For the sentence tasks 35 sentences based on this story and containing a broad
range of English sounds were written. In addition, 8 English words were selected from a
larger corpus whose aim was to assess learners’ proficiency with final consonant and
consonant clusters, an area in which participants’ native languages are particularly poor.
Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, María Luisa García Lecumberri,& Jasone Cenoz Iragui
Degree of foreign accent and age of onset in formal school instruction: 2
Learners’ productions were recorded and 3 minute excerpts were subsequently
randomized and judged by an English native speaker with no linguistic training. Degree
of FA was assessed on a 9-point scale, the extremes of which were “heavy accent” (1
point) and “slight accent” (9 points).
3. RESULTS
95% CI FA Rating N
In order to compare the three age groups as far as degree of FA, mean scores were
obtained for each age group in the four tasks and compared with analyses of variance
(ANOVA). The following figures display these means together with 95% Confidence
Intervals. Comparisons between any two groups were conducted with Scheffé tests.
4,0
3,0
2,0
1,0
1
2
3
Age groups
Figure 1: FA judgements in narration
95% CI FA Rating SR
Figure 1 displays native-speaker judgements of learners’ productions in the story-telling
task. ANOVA results indicated significant differences (F=4.63; p=0.01) among the three
groups (x1=2.25; x2=2.20; x3=3.20). As can be seen, the oldest students were
considered to have a milder FA than the other two groups, which exhibited nearly equal
mean scores. Indeed, the difference between age 4 and age 8 groups was not
statistically significant (p=0.99), whereas the oldest learners differed significantly from
both the youngest and the intermediate children (p=0.04; p=0.03).
4,0
3,0
2,0
1,0
1
2
3
Age groups
Figure 2: FA judgements in sentence reading
Figure 2 presents native judge ratings of children’s productions in the sentence-reading
task. Differences among the three groups (x1=1.85; x2=2.15; x3=2.80) were statistically
significant (F=6.35; p=0.00). Degree of FA ratings were seen to have an inverse
relationship with age. That is to say, the older the learners the less accented they were.
Pairwise comparisons discovered significant differences when comparing age 11 and
CI FA Rating SI
Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, María Luisa García Lecumberri,& Jasone Cenoz Iragui
Degree of foreign accent and age of onset in formal school instruction: 3
95%
age 4 (p=0.00), tendentiously significant differences when contrasting age 11 and age 8
(p=0.06), and no statistical significance (p=0.54) for age 4 vs. age 8 groups.
4,0
3,0
2,0
1,0
1
2
3
Age groups
Figure 3: FA judgements in sentence imitation
95% CI FA Rating WRI
Figure 3 displays listener scores for students’ productions in the sentence-imitation task.
Once more, degree of FA was found to decrease as age increased (x1=1.60; x2=2.00;
x3=2.80). This inverse relationship was highly significant (F=13.30; p=0.00). The degree
of FA exhibited by the oldest learners was significantly lower than FA manifest in the
intermediate and youngest students (p=0.00; p=0.00), while age 4 and age 8 groups
exhibited a degree of FA which was statistically similar (p=0.24).
6,0
5,0
4,0
3,0
1
2
3
Age groups
Figure 4: FA judgements in word reading/imitation
Figure 4 shows native judge scores for speakers’ productions in the word readingimitation task. Again, ANOVA results showed significant differences (F=4.39; p=0.01)
among the three age groups (x1=3.95; x2=4.25; x3=5.15). Differences favoured older
students: the oldest group obtained the best results, the youngest group exhibited the
strongest foreign accent and the intermediate group lay in between. However, in
pairwise comparisons, differences did not reach significance levels when age 8 group
was compared to age 4 and age 11 respectively (p=0.77; p=0.11). The only significant
difference found was that between the youngest and the oldest students (p=0.02).
4. DISCUSSION
Results show that age does exert a significant influence on learners' degree of FA in
English. On most ocassions, FA was seen to decrease with age in an inverse
relationship, agreeing with Singleton & Ryan (2004) in that younger learners are not
always more efficient than older learners. Analyses discovered that starting with English
at ages 4 or 8 did not make a difference as far as degree of FA, whereas the latest
starters (age 11) exhibited a significantly lower degree of FA than the other two younger
Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, María Luisa García Lecumberri,& Jasone Cenoz Iragui
Degree of foreign accent and age of onset in formal school instruction: 4
groups in most tests. This corroborates previous findings on the perception of English
phonemes in formal contexts (García Lecumberri & Gallardo del Puerto, 2003). In other
words, it is the learners who started English instruction the latest that seem to benefit
from their age. However, we have to bear in mind that onset and testing age cannot be
separated in these designs and that older participants are more cognitively mature,
which might have helped them in terms of test-completion skills (reading ability, memory
capacity in the imitation task, general problem-solving strategies in the narration).
Our results also agree with Piske et al.’s (2001) assertion that initial FL exposure before
age 6 does not automatically result in L2 accent-free speech. The CP concept may not
be sustainable in certain situations and the distinction between natural and formal
acquisition may be of great relevance in order to explain the influence of age on FL
phonological acquisition. The limited exposure to FL characteristic of formal instruction
contexts is likely to account for older learners’ superiority in our study. For one thing,
younger starters did not have enough exposure to take advantage of their greater
phonetic sensitivity. Additionally, younger learners may not yet have been able to catch
up with older learners because, due to FL exposure limitations in school contexts, they
are still at an early stage of acquisition (Singleton & Ryan, 2004). These findings agree
with previous formal acquisition research (Cenoz, 2003) and question many current
education policies which promote early FL introduction as the best way to guarantee FL
competence. Curricular changes should be made so as to ensure better exposure to the
FL (more quantity, more intensity, and higher quality) in formal instruction school
contexts, such as the use of FL as a means of instruction for other school subjects.
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