ABSTRACT
For more than three decades, second language acquisition researchers have been interested in investigating the possibility that children enjoy an innate ability to acquire languages more easily and accurately than adults. Penfield (1963) was the first to publish and popularize this notion; but the idea of a critical period for second language acquisition was most effectively promulgated by Lenneberg (1967), who suggested that there were biological foundations for this inherent superiority of children over adolescents and adults. Since the publication of Lenneberg's work, there have been many studies undertaken that suggest that the critical period for language acquisition is most clearly linked to the emergence of foreign accents at about puberty. Second language acquisition researchers have been able to document the unusual but consistent ability of native speakers to rapidly and accurately identify nonnative speech. Larew (1961), Scovel (1969), Asher and Garcia (1969), Seliger, Krashen, and Ladefoged (1975), and Oyama (1976) all have confirmed that native speakers of a variety of languages (e.g., Spanish, English, and Hebrew) can recognize normative speakers of these languages who acquired their second languages after childhood. These early studies continue to be supported by more recent investigations (Levitt, 1992; Major, 1987; Mendes-Figueiredo, 1991; Tahta, Wood, & Lowenthal, 1981; Thompson, 1991), leading one of the most prominent researchers in the field, Long (1990), to argue strongly for the existence of maturational constraints in language learning, not only for phonology but perhaps for morphology and syntax as well. Because there are only a few studies that suggest that the acquisition of morphology and/or syntax in a second language may be adversely affected by increasing age (Coppieters, 1987; Johnson & Newport, 1991; Patkowski, 1980), and because there seems to be contradictory evidence against age constraints on these nonphonological aspects of second language acquisition (Ioup, 1984; Morris & Gerstman, 1986), my own review of the research leads to me to the more traditional and limited claim that there is a critical period for speech, but not for any other aspects of second language acquisition (Scovel, 1988).
