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[sparks]

I didn't read through all of the pages on this topic but I don't think I've seen any mention of Chomsky, although I have seen the "hardwired" for a language idea. I believe that Chomsky gives the age cutoff of three years for becoming hardwired and thus not being able to forget your native language, if you're still speaking it after the age of three you're a native.

[the_thinker]

[quote]I believe that Chomsky gives the age cutoff of three years for becoming hardwired and thus not being able to forget your native language, if you're still speaking it after the age of three you're a native.[/quote]

Well if he said that then the Pallier et al study suggests he is mistaken. The participants were up to eight years of age when they left Korea but as adults didn't show any of the brain activity consistent with word recognition when shown / made to listen to Korean words.

[JZer]

[Sashadroogie]

How much research is needed in Korea or Taiwan to come up with results that show that teachers have less than average intelligence? Seriously, if a native English-speaking teacher is saying 'please write your test', then he or she should be publicly flogged for stupidity and incompetence, and not mentioned as evidence of L2 interference. They have not mastered their L1 yet, for God's sake.

[JZer]

[Sashadroogie]

True? Sigh...why am I not surprised?

[yakov1]

interesting discussion...

i am Australian but lived in England from 8-11 years of age.

I lost my Australian accent within a few weeks of arrival.

I have never lost my British one!

The last seven years living in north queensland finally gave me some mild aussie inflection but English and others will immediately ask me where in the Uk am i from.

What is funny is i lived in Hampshire and the accents were quite posh but my best friend was a cockney and so that became my accent. a cockney aussie living in Hampshire.

I tried very hard to get rid of my accent when i came back(kids can be so cruel) but it never went away and i can switch into it if i want. I now speak with a refined British accent(ironically closer to the true Hampshire accent) in the classroom.

I do believe you can lose some of your native accent and language...i started to pick up some bad habits from students " I not want to do that" instead of " I don't want to do that" simply because of the structure of Russian, so I must be mindful of that.

I do speak, outside the classroom, in a russian accented English for ease of communication...and it is sometimes hard to switch into British type accent( Australian is hardest of all i have to force that on).

My sisters gained a slight british accent living in the Uk but soon lost it again when they came back to australia due to their age(much older) and my younger brother (who spoke like me) gained an australian accent when he came back...i was the odd one out.

from this i know a) some accents are very resilient and resist attempts to change b) a long time in another country can enable a loss in grammar and speaking ability c) accents can weaken overtime though, eventually.

by the way i speak Russian with a Moscow accent, i speak Bahasa Indonesian and my Chinese is of northern China accent...i was a linguist and i guess i have an ear and i consider accent an important part of pronunciation...i also speak with an uzbek accent from tashkent. my uzbek and russian(which i am strongest in) people won't know I'm not from these areas and it still allows me to speak British or Australian when I choose. I may not be a typical example but you can certainly leanr other languages up to the same level of spoken ability if you are in country with no one ever knowing you are not a native.

[gaijinalways]

sashadroogie posted