Revisiting the role of age in second language speech acquisition

Abstract

The present study investigated whether age of acquisition (AOA) is a significant predictor of the extent to which Korean learners of English perceive and produce two nonnative vowels and the extent to which their speech perception and production accuracy are linked. A total of 100 Korean learners of English with a varying range of AOA participated in the study by completing perception and production measurement tasks. Overall, there were significant AOA effects found in the case of Korean participants who moved to Canada before the age breakpoint range of 17.0 to 25.5, after which AOA failed to be a significant predictor of their perception and production accuracy. In addition, compared to late second language (L2) learners, early L2 learners more consistently demonstrated instances of significant perception-production correlation. This study concludes by highlighting the role of AOA in L2 speech acquisition, supporting the existence of a critical period for intelligible L2 pronunciation.