Silly Linguistics Magazine Issue 73 Back Issue

Beyond the Critical Period: Can Older Language Learners Achieve Native-Like Pronunciation?

By Faith Huggins

“If you have ever studied child language acquisition before, you may have heard of the ‘critical period’ (Lenneberg, 1967) – usually referred to as the age between 0-5 where a child can acquire a first language. Anything after that, and the child will, as studies have proven, never be able to fully grasp a language fully (grammatically and lexically). What I endeavour to shine a light on is the critical period for second language learners regarding accent; this critical period is the period in which a language learner can fully sound like a native speaker. In other words, the research into the question ‘Can I ever sound like a native speaker if I’m an older language learner?’.”

How language changes over time – A brief look at two examples

By Lydia Pryba

“As language changes over time, it undergoes a lot of small changes over the course of centuries. These changes can only be measured many years later, once they have been completed and their consequences have been accepted by those speaking it. A difficulty in measuring language change is the need to collect authentic data. How do we find out what people 1000 years ago have been saying? Was it identical to the written accounts that survived through time? In some cases, we will have to speculate, in other cases linguists collect all the data they can about a certain language family and construct older versions depending on the rules they discover, to get closer to the lost root of a language. In this article, I want to shed light on two important examples of documented and scientifically examined language change.
One will be the second sound shift of the German Language, and the other one the long vowel shift of the English language.”