Hi It is not the same as "fluency", but English proficiency (might include fluency?) certainly shows a tapering off long before puberty. See following graph.
http://www.pnas.org/content/103/27/10155/F5.expansion.html A similar graph for following paper, also shows similar decline with age of immigration, with additional effects of amount of education. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/14/1/31.abstract Here is a nice paper on accents that shows detectable accents in two groups of Native Italian speakers who had emigrated around 5 years of age and had been in the country for an average of 34 years, relative to native English speakers. The two NI groups differed on amount of use of Italian, low or high, with the latter group's utterances being seen as less native English like than the former. http://jimflege.com/files/Flege_Frieda_L1_use_JP_97.pdf Flege has done much work on accents, including following earlier paper showing decline in English fluency starting quite young. http://jimflege.com/files/Flege_Munro_factors_affecting_JASA_1995.pdf His homepage links to numerous articles (pdfs for all that I looked at). jimflege.com Take care Jim James M. Clark Professor of Psychology 204-786-9757 204-774-4134 Fax [email protected] >>> Rob Weisskirch <[email protected]> 10-Feb-11 6:29:42 PM >>> TIPSfolk, Joan is wrong... children learn language and accent from the environment--with parents being a primary source, but other sources of language also providing an influence--like the TV and other people. Many of us children of accented speakers do not speak with our parents' accented speech just like we don't adopt their different use of grammar, in most cases. Puberty is roughly a cut-off for second language learning because of the likely synaptic pruning that takes place in the brain. However, nonnative speakers can acquire near native fluency after puberty with regular exposure. The best source I've read on bilingualism lately was: Ellen Bialystok, Fergus I.M. Craik, David W. Green, and Tamar H. Gollan Psychological Science in the Public Interest, December 2009; vol. 10, 3: pp. 89-129. --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=8685 or send a blank email to leave-8685-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
