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Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 2012, 34, 187214.doi:10.1017/S0272263112000022

Cambridge University Press 2012 187

AGE OF ONSET AND NATIVELIKE

L2 ULTIMATE ATTAINMENT

OF MORPHOSYNTACTIC AND

PHONETIC INTUITION

Niclas AbrahamssonStockholm University

Research has consistently shown there is a negative correlation be-

tween age of onset (AO) of acquisition and ultimate attainment (UA) of

either pronunciation or grammar in a second language (L2). A few

studies have indeed reported nativelike behavior in some postpuberty

learners with respect to either phonetics/phonology or morphosyntax,a result that has sometimes been taken as evidence against the critical

period hypothesis (CPH). However, in the few studies that have em-

ployed a wide range of linguistic tests and tasks, adult learners have

not exhibited nativelike L2 proficiency across the board of measures,

which, according to some, suggests that the hypothesis still holds. The

present study investigated the relationship between AO and UA and

the incidence of nativelikeness when measures of phonetic and gram-

matical intuition are combined. An additional aim was to investigate

whether children and adults develop the L2 through fundamentally dif-ferent brain mechanismsnamely, whether children acquire the

language (more) implicitly as an interdependent whole, whereas

adults learn it (more) explicitly as independent parts of a whole.

This study is part of the research program High-Level Second Language Use, funded bythe Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (grant no. M2005-0459). The author wishesto thank all the 770-something persons who initially volunteered, and in particular the 220who were eventually selected as participants for the study. Thanks also go to researchassistants Linda Martins and Helne Norstedt for doing an impeccable job with the datacollection, and Helne also with the VOT analyses. Im deeply grateful to my colleaguesProfessor Kenneth Hyltenstam and Associate Professor Emanuel Bylund for their feed-back on an earlier draft of the manuscript, and also to Lamont Antieau, who checked andcorrected my English writing in no time at all.

Address correspondence to: Niclas Abrahamsson, Centre for Research on Bilingualism,Stockholm University, SE 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden; e-mail: [email protected].


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Niclas Abrahamsson188

A central issue in linguistics and SLA theory is why language acquisitionseems to become more difficulteven impossible, according to someresearcherswith age. After some 45 years of intense empirical research

and scientific debate, the question of why children are more successfullanguage acquirers than adults, and whether and why adult (or late) sec-ond language (L2) learners inevitably fall short of nativelikeness, stillengages many students of language development, language learning, andlanguage teaching.

The general theoretical context for this research has been Lenne-bergs (1967) critical period hypothesis (CPH), which predicts that nor-mal language acquisition from mere language exposure is no longerpossible after a certain age. In Lennebergs specific hypothesis, 1213

years were established as the critical age because, at the time, it wasbelieved that puberty co-occurred with the maturation of the brain. ForLenneberg, the brains maturation was manifested by its lateralization,after which cerebral flexibility, or plasticity, seemed to become signifi-cantly reduced.

However, brain lateralization as a sign of maturation was soon thetarget of serious criticism by numerous researchers, not least of allwhen the lateralization process was found to be completed much earlierthan at puberty (see, e.g., Krashen, 1973). Additionally, the relevance of

puberty has been questioned frequently with reference to its elusive-ness, variability, and relativity as a concept. Although ages 1213 stillappear often in SLA research, either as an observed cutoff point instudies of nativelike L2 ultimate attainment (UA; e.g., Abrahamsson &Hyltenstam, 2008, 2009) or as an a priori dividing point in studies com-paring early and late learners (e.g., Flege, Yeni-Komshian, & Liu, 1999;Montrul & Slabakova, 2003; van Boxtel, Bongaerts, & Coppen, 2005; vanWuijtswinkel, 1994; White & Genesee, 1996), lower ages of first expo-sure, such as 67 years, are sometimes mentioned as the maximum age

if nativelike proficiency is to be expected as the typical outcome (e.g.,Hyltenstam, 1992; Johnson & Newport, 1989; Long, 1990). Some authorseven suggest a pattern of L2 UA without a plateau and instead with alinear rather than nonlinear function of maturation from birth up to pu-berty or perhaps even to the midteens (Birdsong, 1999; Hyltenstam &Abrahamsson, 2003b). Additionally, neurocognitive correlates otherthan lateralization have been suggested, one of the most interesting sofar being that of sequentially scheduled myelination processes thatseem to correlate amazingly well with stages of first language (L1) devel-

opment (e.g., Pulvermller & Schumann, 1994).Because the levels of UA among children and adults in the L2 havebeen shown to clearly differ from each other, both in relative terms (UAis higher in child learners than in adult learners) and in absolute terms(nativelike UA only seems to develop in child learners), a closely re-lated research question has been whether children and adults actually


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Age of Onset and Nativelike L2 Ultimate Attainment 189

use fundamentally different cognitive (or brain) mechanisms when ap-proaching a new language. Some researchers (e.g., Bley-Vroman, 1989;DeKeyser, 2000; Paradis, 2004, 2009) hold that even though children,

within the critical period, acquire language automatically, incidentally,and implicitly from spoken (or signed) input via an innate and special-ized capacity for doing so (e.g., through a language-acquisition deviceor universal grammar, as proposed by Chomskyan linguists), adults, orpostcritical period learners (including most adolescents), must insteadlearn the new language through a conscious effort, intentionally andexplicitly, using general cognitive learning strategies, often via formalinstruction. According to this view, the neurocognitive system respon-sible for general cognition is not optimized for handling natural (spoken

or signed) linguistic data in the same way as the innate language acqui-sition mechanism is, which is why most adults typically end up as non-nativelike speakers of their L2. In other words, the outcome of much ofadult learning is explicit knowledge of grammar and pronunciation,something that is very difficult to use in normal language productionand perception, whereas children primarily acquire implicit competencethat is, morphosyntactic and phonetic intuitionwithin the targetlanguage (similar or even identical to that of children acquiring a L1).The division between language-specific and general cognition may also

explain how some extremely rare adult learners in fact approachnativelike levels in a L2namely by making use of an unusually high apti-tude for language learning, a trait that most researchers claim belongs tothe general cognitive system (see DeKeyser, 2000; DeKeyser & Larson-Hall, 2005; Paradis, 2009; however, for alternative interpretations, seeAbrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2008; Carroll, 1973; Ioup, Boustagui, El Tigi, &Moselle, 1994).

The present study investigated, first, the relationship between AOand UA in Spanish-speaking learners of Swedish as a L2 and, second, the

incidence of nativelikeness in the areas of grammar and phonology,with the use of tests of grammatical and phonetic intuition. The studyalso investigated whether children and adults approach the task oflanguage acquisition in fundamentally different ways, that is, whetherthey acquire the language implicitly as an interdependent whole or learnit explicitly as independent parts of a whole (see Paradis, 2004, 2009).

THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL BACKGROUND

To date, it is possible to identify at least three main approaches in SLAresearch to the behavioral study of age effects, all of which have beenused to draw indirect conclusions about maturational constraints andthe CPH. The focus of attention has been either on (a) the relationshipbetween learners AO and UA in the L2, (b) the relationship between AO


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and nativelike UA, or (c) the relationship between AO and the veryprocess leading to a learners UA. What these approaches have incommon is that, in one way or another, they focus on the learners AO

in relation to their UA of the L2that is, the different levels of profi-ciency that are eventually reached by learners as a result of their startingto learn the language at different ages.

Age of Onset and Ultimate Attainment

In the 1970s, some researchers (e.g., Snow & Hoefnagel-Hhle, 1977,

1978) investigated differences in the rate of acquisition of early and latelearners. Because late learners were found to progress faster in the ini-tial phases of L2 development, the conclusion was that the advantagethat children held over adults in L2 learning was a myth and that theCPH (or at least Lennebergs version of it) must therefore be rejected.Later, in a review of the research up to that point, Krashen, Long, andScarcella (1979) brought some order among age studies: They demon-strated that it was only short-term studiesthat is, those studies witha focus on the initial rate of acquisitionthat exhibited an older-learner

advantage, whereas all long-term studiesthat is, those investigatingtheir participants AO of acquisition in relation to their UA in theL2pointed to an unquestionable early-learner advantage; most impor-tantly, Krashen and colleagues (see also Long, 1990, 2005) concludedthat only long-term studies had any relevance for the CPH.

A large number of studies have compared the UA of groups of earlyand late L2 learners (e.g., Asher & Garca, 1969; Bialystok & Miller,1999; DeKeyser, 2000; Flege et al., 1999; Johnson & Newport, 1989;Munro & Mann, 2005; Patkowski, 1980). In every case, such studies

have demonstrated a strong negative correlation between L2 learnersAO of acquisition and some measure of their L2 proficiencygrammatical,phonological, or even both. For example, in the seminal study byJohnson and Newport (1989), in which the intuition of Englishgrammar (operationalized as the scores on a grammaticality judg-ment test [GJT]) of 46 Korean and Chinese long-term residents in theUnited States was correlated with the participants age of arrival inthe country, showed (a) that there was a strong, negative correlationbetween AO and GJT scores among the early starters (AO 315;

r= .87,p< .01) with little individual variation; (b) that very early starters(AO 37) invariably performed like native control participants; and (c) thatthe negative correlation between AO and GJT scores disappeared(i.e., GJT scores could no longer be predicted from AO) after AO 15(r= .16,p> .05) and was instead replaced by great individual varia-tion. Despite much criticism and some indisputable methodological


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shortcomings, the results of Johnson and Newport must still be seenas fairly robust today, insofar as no study has ever been able to showan entirely different AO function, although the exact correlation coef-

ficient has varied between studies, as has the locus of any cutoff pointon the AO continuumvery much depending on the focus of thestudy. Furthermore, the Johnson and Newport study showed that noother emotional or experiential factors could account for the varia-tion in the results, and as yet, no other study has with any convictiondemonstrated strong correlations between UA and independent vari-ables alternative to AO, such as length of residence in the host coun-try, age at testing, educational level, formal L2 studies, patterns orfrequency of language input and use, and motivational, attitudinal,

or affectional (etc.) factors.

Age of Onset and the Incidence of Nativelikeness

Another approach to investigating the CPH, or the age factor in general,has been to identify postpubescent or adult L2 learners who, despite alate start, perform like child L2 learners or native speakers on a certain

test of L2 proficiency. The rationale behind this approach is that if itcould be shown that individuals with a nativelike command of the L2exist despite having learned it after the closing of an assumed criticalperiod, then there can be no such periodat least not in the usual,biological sense. Coppieters (1987) investigated a group of highlysuccessful and highly educated learners of French as a foreign language(FL), all of whom had no obvious foreign accent. However, despite theirapparent nativelike command of French, the results of a semantic-syntactic judgment test showed that their overall results were signifi-

cantly lower than the results of a native-speaker control group, andrecorded spontaneous speech revealed that these learners producederrors on features that were mastered in the judgment test. In contrast,in a replication of the Coppieters study, Birdsong (1992) identified 15out of 20 late FL learners of Frenchall highly selected for potentialnativelikenesswho performed within the native-speaker range on aGJT. Additionally, several replications of the Johnson and Newportstudy have reported on some late learners whose grammaticality judg-ment scores fall within the range of native controls (e.g., Birdsong &

Molis, 2001; Flege et al., 1999). In the area of phonology and pronuncia-tion, studies by Bongaerts and his colleagues targeted both highly ad-vanced FL university students (see Bongaerts, 1999, for an overview) andimmersed adult L2 learners of Dutch in the Netherlands (Bongaerts, Men-nen, & van der Slik, 2000). In these studies, recorded sentences readaloud by the participants (as well as by native-control participants)


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were presented to panels of native judges who rated the pronunciationof these speakers on a 5-point scale (e.g., from very strong accent; defi-nitely a nonnative speakerto no foreign accent at all; definitely a native

speaker); the result of these studies has been that a small subset ofparticipantstypically one or two individualspass for native speakers(see also Moyer, 1999, for similar results).

Although these learners should indeed be seen as extremely profi-cient L2 speakers, their apparently nativelike behavior is invariably re-vealed as being less than nativelike when scrutinized in greater detail.The first study to clearly illustrate this was Ioup and colleagues (1994),in which the UA of two extremely successful adult learners of L2 Egyp-tian Arabic, Julie and Laura, was investigated in terms of spontaneous,

oral production, dialect differentiation, and grammatical intuition. Inthe production task and the two tests of Arabic dialect differentiation,both learners performed within the range of a native-speaker controlgroup. However, even though both learners scored high on the threetests of grammatical intuition, their performance was significantlybelow that of the native controls. In a similar manner, Hyltenstamand Abrahamsson (2003) and Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam (2009)showed that all the adolescent and adult L2 learners of Swedish inthese studies, although sounding nativelike in everyday conversation,

performed significantly below the native-speaker range when theirphonological, perceptual, grammatical, lexical, and other L2 abilitieswere investigated in detail. In fact, so far no study relying on a multivar-iate test design (including challenging tests and tasks, not just tests ofvery basic linguistic structures and trivial features) has been able todescribe an adult L2 learner who, in every relevant respect, exhibits aL2 proficiency that is fully comparable to that of native speakers. Thisis why some researchers prefer to use the term near-nativerather thannativelike when characterizing such learners (e.g., Abrahamsson &

Hyltenstam, 2008, 2009; Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, 2003a, 2003b;Long & Robinson, 1998).

Age of Onset and Implicit Acquisition versus Explicit Learning

A third way of investigating child-adult differences in L2 acquisition hasbeen to focus on how differently aged learners arrive at their L2 knowl-

edge. Do they learn the L2 through the same or different brain mecha-nisms? Is their ultimate L2 proficiency qualitatively the same or differentin terms of origin, emergence, and representation? According to Bley-Vromans fundamental difference hypothesis (FDH), children and adultsdevelop their L2 in fundamentally different ways: Whereas childrenmake use of their innate and domain-specific language acquisition


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mechanisms, adults no longer have access to such mechanisms and in-stead must rely on domain-general learning strategiesthat is, strategiesbelonging to the general cognitive system that are used for all kinds of

learning and not language acquisition specifically. In Paradiss (2004,2009) theory of L2 acquisition and bilingualism, L1 children and early L2learners engage almost solely in incidental acquisition, which arisesthrough procedural memory and leads to implicit competence (or lin-guistic intuition). Adolescent and adult L2 learners, on the contrary,who can no longer build new procedural representations to the sameextent as children, learn the L2 intentionally and have to rely on declar-ative memory, which leads to explicit competence (or metalinguisticknowledge, in Paradiss terminology). Incidental acquisition should af-

fect the whole language system, and different parts of the system shouldthus develop simultaneously and unconsciously, whereas intentionallearning should affect mostly those parts of the L2 in which the learnerreceived explicit instruction and in which he or she took a specialinterest.

These issues have not been investigated, let alone corroborated, inany direct empirical way; rather, they have been explored indirectlythrough studies of language learning aptitude. Paradis (2009) claimedthat some rare [adult] L2 speakers may achieve native-like proficiency

. . . but by other means (p. 118), and DeKeyser (2000) and Abrahams-son and Hyltenstam (2008) were able to show that late learners withnativelike performances on various aspects of the L2 also perform wellon standardized aptitude tests, which indicates that they draw heavilyon general cognitive learning abilities (i.e., declarative memory, in Para-diss terms) to compensate for the loss of (innate) specific languageacquisition mechanisms (or procedural memory, in Paradiss theory).Early learners, in contrast, are not dependent on declarative memory orany kind of heightened cognitive ability (or aptitude)they acquire the

L2 successfully through the availability of procedural memory alone.According to Paradis, acquisition via procedural memory is availableto everyone up to about 5 years of age, after which the use of proce-dural memory to acquire language rapidly declines and individualsrely on declarative memory (p. 118). He further states that some im-plicit linguistic competence in L2 can probably be acquired [by adults]in certain aspects of linguistic structure (syntax, morphology, pho-nology, in that order of probability) though not completely at anylevel (p. 118) and that the use of declarative memory to compensate

for gaps in L2 implicit competence is reflected in the considerableinter-individual variability in attainment between [adult] L2 learners(p. 118). If Paradis is correct, evidence should be found that adultslearning of different aspects of the L2 is more sporadic, unsystematic,and fragmented, whereas children automatically and systematicallydevelop aspects of all linguistic levels at the same time. Paradis (2009)


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states that the availability of procedural memory for acquiringlanguage as a whole decreases with age (p. 24). This means that thechild learner unconsciously and incidentally approaches the L2 as an

interconnected system (i.e., as a language), whereas the adult learnertreats the different levels and sublevels of the L2 as independent puz-zles, some of which the learner can choose to focus on in depth, andsome of which canconsciously or unconsciouslybe disregarded aseither uninteresting, unnecessary, or unlearnable, if not left entirelyunnoticed.

Aims and Hypotheses of the Present Study

This study investigated the UA of grammatical and phonetic intui-tion by Spanish-speaking L2 learners of Swedish, all of whom werelong-term residents of Sweden and whose AO of L2 acquisition ofSwedish was between 1 and 30 years. Morphosyntactic intuition wasmeasured through an aural GJT and phonetic intuition by a test ofcategorical perception of voice onset time (VOT). The aim of thestudy was to add to the current knowledge on the relationship

between AO and UA, the relationship between AO and the incidenceof nativelike UA, and, finally, the relationship between AO and theunderlying processes of language learningthat is, whether chil-dren and adults use fundamentally different mechanisms whenacquiring a language. With these aims in mind, hypotheses 13 wereformulated:1. Age of onset will be the strongest predictor of UA for both morphosyntactic

and phonetic intuition. More specifically, significant differences in mean re-

sults between native speakers, early L2 learners, and late L2 learners, as wellas strong negative correlations between AO and UA, are expected for bothGJT and VOT; weak or no correlations are expected between UA and the L2participants present age (AGE), length of residence in Sweden (LOR) oramount of Spanish use (L1 USE).

2. (a) No late L2 learner will be found with nativelike results on both the mor-phosyntactic and the phonetic test.

(b) A majority of very early (i.e., preschool) L2 learners will have nativelikeresults on both the morphosyntactic and the phonetic test.

(c) Very few, if any, very early L2 learners will be found with nonnativelike

results on both the morphosyntactic and the phonetic test.(d) A majority of the late L2 learners will have nonnativelike results on both

the morphosyntactic and the phonetic test.3. Independently of the absolute level of UA (i.e., no matter where on the inter-

language continuum a learners system has stabilized), grammatical andphonetic intuition are expected to have developed simultaneously and to


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similar degrees in early L2 learners but not in late L2 learners. More specifi-cally, it is predicted that the GJT and VOT measures will correlate positivelyfor early learners only, not for late learners.

METHOD

Participants

The participants were recruited through a series of newspaper adver-tisements.1From a pool of approximately 700 L1 Spanish speakers of L2Swedish and approximately 70 native speakers (NSs) of Swedish whovolunteered, 200 L2 participants and 20 native controls were selectedfor the study. The L2 participants were selected in such a way that theywere to be evenly distributed over an AO continuum ranging from 1 to30 years. In other words, the sample consisted of six to eight partici-pants at each AO.2All participants age at the time of the study was 21 ormore (M= 40, range= 2163), their LOR in Sweden was at least 15 years(M= 25, range= 1546), and they reported no significant use of otherlanguages than Spanish or Swedish during childhood. The most commoncountry of origin was Chile (112 individuals), as the Chilean group is thelargest Spanish-speaking immigrant group in Sweden, followed by Peru(22), Argentina (16), Spain (13), Colombia (12), Bolivia (8), Uruguay(8), Guatemala (2), Mexico (2), Cuba (1), Ecuador (1), El Salvador (1), Nica-ragua (1), and Panama (1). In other words, the great majority of the par-ticipants (n = 187) originated from a Latin American country. Allparticipants lived in or around the Stockholm area and had done soduring most of their time in Sweden. A senior high school diploma wasthe lowest level of education, and the distribution of females and males

was 11783. The native Swedish control group was selected by matchingage at the time of the study (M= 41.2 years), sex (12 women, 8 men), andeducational level with the L2 group. No severe hearing impairmentswere reported by any of the participants, which was confirmed throughhearing tests with an OSCILLA SM 910 screening audiometer, nor wereany other language-related challenges such as dyslexia or stuttering.

Because the aim of this study was to compare early and late learners,the sample of 200 L2 participants was divided into two halves: one thatconsisted of learners with AO 115 (n= 101) and one of learners with

AO 1630 (n = 99) (following the division between early and latelearners made by, e.g., DeKeyser, 2000; Johnson & Newport, 1989;Patkowski, 1980). As can be seen in Table 1, the mean chronological ageat the time of the study was 3435 years in the early-learner group and4647 years in the late-learner group, a difference that is statisticallysignificant. Furthermore, there was a small yet statistically significant


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difference concerning LOR in Sweden: 26 versus 23 years, respectively.Self-reported daily use of Spanish (expressed in percentages) did notdiffer significantly between the groups: 25% versus 28%, respectively.The fact that the groups differed in age at the time of the study wasunproblematic because there were no relevant reasons to believe thatage as such would have an impact on the participants L2 intuitions(see results in MacKay, Flege, & Imai, 2006). In a similar manner, the

small difference in LOR should have no significant impact on theparticipants L2 proficiency (as evidenced by the partial correlationsin the Results section). The early AO group consisted of 60 womenand 41 men, and the late AO group of 57 women and 42 men, but ac-cording to a Chi2 test, the difference was not statistically significant:

2(1, 200) = 0.07,p= .89.

Tests and Procedure

The tests reported on in this study, GJT and categorical perception ofVOT, were part of a larger set of tests that also included VOT produc-tion, other (global) pronunciation tasks (e.g., word-list reading andstory retelling), and a test of grammatical and semantic inferencingskills as well as a battery of four different language aptitude tests. Theparticipants were tested individually for about 22.5 hr by a nativeSwedish assistant, and they were paid SEK 100.00 (Swedish kronor) and

a lottery ticket worth SEK 25.00 (a total value of approximately $20.00).The reason for choosing only two linguistic measures for the pre-sent study rather than reporting on the results of the whole test batterywas the following: A previous study (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2009)demonstrated that, with a test battery consisting of a variety of dif-ferent phonetic-phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical-semantic

Table 1. Background information (independent variables) on the 200L2 speakers; comparisons between participants with AO 15 and 16years (df = 198)

AO 115(n= 101)

AO 1630(n= 99)

ttest(two-tailed)

Independent variable M SD M SD t p

AGE (years) 34.4 7.5 46.7 7.0 11.9 < .0001LOR (years) 26.2 6.2 23.4 6.2 3.26 = .0013L1 USE (%) 25.0 18.2 28.1 18.7 1.18 = .24, ns

Note. AGE = chronological age; LOR = length of residence; L1 USE = L1 use.


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measures (10 altogether), any advanced and apparently nativelikeadult L2 learner could be revealed as only superficially nativelike (ornear-native) compared to a group of NSs. In contrast, in the present

study, which focused on a normally distributed sample of learnersrather than systematically searching for exceptionally successfullearners, the purpose was to investigate whether two independentand fairly disparate linguistic measuresone of phonetic intuitionand another of grammatical intuitionwould suffice to reveal the non-native background of average postcritical period L2 learners.

Furthermore, the rationale behind choosing GJT data rather than spo-ken or written language production data, and data from a VOT percep-tion test rather than the participants own manifestation of the voicing

contrast, was that this study aimed to investigate aspects of L2 speakerspassive, unconscious, and implicit knowledge of Swedish grammar andpronunciation, without the need to draw indirect conclusions fromperformance data. Implicit language knowledge in the present study isequated with acquired, nonverbalized linguistic intuition, whereasexplicit language knowledge corresponds to learned and, to a large extent,metalinguistic competence that can be verbally expressed by speakers.

The basic idea behind focusing on implicit rather than explicit knowl-edge is that implicit, unconscious, and incidental acquisition of language

is what the CPH is actually concerned with: Lenneberg (1967) stressedthat what disappears at around puberty is the ability to attain automaticacquisition from mere exposure (p. 176), whereas the explicit languagelearning that adults typically engage in through a conscious and la-bored effort (p. 176), successfully or not, lies outside the scope of theCPH (see also discussion in DeKeyser, 2000).

Grammaticality Judgment Test (GJT). The auditory GJT (originallydeveloped by Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2008, 2009) used in this study

included 80 sentences based on four morphosyntactic structures or fea-tures of Swedish grammar known to be particularly difficult for L2 learners:(a) subject-verb inversion (i.e., V2), (b) reflexive possessive pronouns,(c) placement of sentence adverbs in restrictive relative clauses, and(d) adjective agreement in predicative position (gender and number). Halfof the sentences were grammatically correct and half were grammaticallyincorrect; faulty sentences contained only a single error. Each of thesegrammatical categories was represented by 20 sentences, 10 of which wereungrammatical (see the Appendix for examples of the sentences used).

The present GJT differed substantially from those used in previousage studies (e.g., Bialystok & Miller, 1999; DeKeyser, 2000; Flege et al.,1999; Johnson & Newport, 1989) and was originally designed to inves-tigate near-native L2 speakers intuitions. Because the focus in studiesof very advanced or near-native L2 speakers should not be on what theycan do but rather on what they cannot do (Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson,


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2003a; Long, 1990), the test items consisted of sentences that werequite long and complex. Given the fact that the participants in the pre-sent study had been living in the L2 environment for at least 15 years

(see 5 years in Johnson & Newport, 1989) and for 25 years on average,it was decided that demanding test items would more accurately gaugethe participants L2 proficiency than items of the kind used in earlierstudies (such as *Mary will goes to Europe next year, *When Sam will fixhis car?; examples from Johnson & Newport, 1989), and ceiling effectswould thus be avoided, even among the NS controls. Additionally, theuse of a test with a high degree of difficulty and cognitive load even forNSs serves as a better means to distinguish between native and near-native intuitions and between near-native and clearly nonnative intui-

tions as well as between different degrees of near-nativeness, and thistest can therefore be seen as a guarantee against conclusions basedon underanalyzed data (see Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2008, 2009;McDonald, 2006).

The stimulus sentences were recorded in an anechoic chamber by afemale NS of Stockholm Swedish. The sentences were played throughKOSS TX/PRO earphones in random order for all participants. Once agiven sentence was presented, the test taker was granted a maximum of10 s to indicate whether he or she perceived the sentence as grammati-

cally correct or incorrect. Responses were submitted by pressing agreen YES or a red NO button at any point during or after the sentencepresentation. The next sentence was loaded and presented once one ofthe response buttons was pressed. If no response was submitted beforetime expired, a new sentence was presented; these cases were analyzedas incorrect responses. The test was designed and run in E-Prime v1.0(Schneider, Eschman, & Zuccolotto, 2002a, 2002b) and took 1520minutes to complete.

Categorical Perception of VOT. Voice onset time is defined as theinterval between the release burst of the stop and the onset ofglottal vibration (Lisker & Abramson, 1964, p. 389). Swedish (likeEnglish) voiceless stops are produced as aspirated, long-lag stops(with relatively long, positive VOT values), whereas their voicedcounterparts are realized as unaspirated short-lag stops (i.e., withshort, positive VOTs). In Spanish, on the contrary, voiceless stopsare realized as positive, short-lag stops, whereas voiced stops areproduced with prevoicing (or voicing lead). As shown in Figure 1,

this means that there is an overlap between the Swedish and Spanishvoicing systems, where Swedish voiced /b, d, / are more or less iden-tical to Spanish voiceless /p, t, k/. Due to this crosslinguistic varia-tion, L2 learners often experience difficulty in accurately producingand perceiving L2 stops. Late learners have been shown to eithertransfer their native-language voice timing patterns to the L2 or, even


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more frequently, produce stops with VOTs intermediate to the VOTvalues of the L1 and L2. Early learners, however, often produce andperceive L2 stops in a more nativelike manner (e.g., Abrahamsson,Stlten, & Hyltenstam, in press; Flege, 1991; Stlten, 2005, 2006;Williams, 1980).

The perception of stops has frequently been investigated with exper-iments of categorical perception. The results obtained from such exper-iments indicate that people typically separate an acoustic continuuminto distinct, language-specific phonetic categories by perceiving

sudden category shifts rather than continuous transitions between cat-egories (e.g., Abramson & Lisker, 1973). This means that NSs of Spanishand Swedish will have different loci on the VOT continuum concerningwhere the voicing categories separate.

The present test, which measured the participants intuitions ofwhere on the VOT continuum the category shift from Swedish voice-less /p/ to voiced /b/ occurs, was based on the minimal word pairpar(pair or couple) and bar(bar, naked or bare, or carry PRET),which had been recorded in an anechoic chamber by a native female

speaker of Swedish. Using the Soundswell software, a 5-ms-step VOTcontinuum ranging from 60 to +90 ms was created (for details, seeStlten, 2006; Stlten, Abrahamsson, & Hyltenstam, 2012). In a forced-choice identification task, the stimuli were presented binaurallythrough earphones (KOSS TX/PRO) at a comfortable listening leveland in random order for each listener. The participants were toldthey were going to hear the words parand barmany times and in amixed order, and they were asked to indicate for each test item which ofthe two words they heard. Each test item was presented with the carrier

phraseNu hr du . . .Now you will hear . . ., and by pressing one of twobuttons, labeled PAR and BAR, respectively, the participants indirectlyindicated whether they perceived the initial stop as voiceless or voiced.The test was designed and run in E-Prime (see previously) and tookabout 5 min to complete. The average category crossover points werecalculated with the Probit Analysis function in SPSS.

Figure 1. Schematic representation of the VOT continuum, showingthe relationship between Swedish and Spanish stops, with overlapbetween Swedish voiced and Spanish voiceless categories. 0 corre-sponds to the release of stop closure.


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RESULTS

The Effect of AO on UA: Group Comparisons and Correlations

The results of the GJT and VOT test for the NSs, the early L2 learners(AO 115), and the late L2 learners (AO 1630) are presented in Table 2.The NS mean score on the GJT was 66 (out of 80), and 53 and 45 forthe early and late learners, respectively. A one-way ANOVA showedthat there were statistically significant differences between the groups,F(2, 220) = 82.68,p< .0001, and post hoc tests confirmed that the differ-ences between adjacent groupsthat is, between the NSs and the earlyL2 learners and between the early and late L2 learnerswere statistically

significant, t= 7.33 and 7.81, respectively,p< .01 (using the Bonferronicorrection to adjust for multiple comparisons). The effect size of the NSand early L2 group difference was very large (Cohens d= 1.65), whereasthe effect size of the difference between the two L2 groups was large(d= 1.10). The mean crossover points on the VOT perception test were+8.81 ms for the NS group, 2.40 ms for the early L2 group, and 9.72 msfor the late L2 group. Again, an ANOVA test revealed statistically signif-icant differences between groups,F(2, 215) = 32.97,p< .0001, and posthoc tests revealed statistically significant differences between the

NSs and early L2 learners, t= 4.56, and between the two L2 groups, 5.09,p < .01 (with Bonferroni correction). Effect sizes of these differenceswere large (d= 1.09) and medium (d= 0.73), respectively.

A more detailed representation of the age function is given in Figure 2,in which (a) GJT scores and (b) VOT crossover points (in ms) have

Table 2. GJT mean scores and VOT mean crossover points (ms) ofNSs, L2 speakers AO 115, and L2 speakers AO 1630

Participant group

NSs(n= 20)

Early L2 learners,AO 115

(n= 101/100i)

Late L2 learners,AO 1630

(n= 99/95i)

GJT scoreM 66 53 45SD 6.81 8.81 5.29Range 5676 3277 3157

VOT crossoveri

M +8.81 2.40 9.72SD 9.60 10.99 8.81Range 8 to +23 29 to +18 33 to +12

iFive participants (one in the AO 115 group and five in the AO 1530 group) were removed from theVOT data due to missing or uninterpretable data.


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been plotted against the participants AOs. An initial visual inspectionof the data reveals an overall negative relationship between test resultsand AO, and the regression lines suggest that such a relationship ismost prevalent on the left-hand sides of the scatter plots (i.e., for the

early learners), but not on the right-hand sides (i.e., the late learners).These visual patterns are confirmed by the correlation coefficientsshown in Table 3 (to account for multiple correlations, checking fourindependent variablesAO, LOR, L1 USE, and AGEthe Bonferronicorrection was used, and the level for these and upcoming corre-lations was set at p= .0125). The correlation between GJT and AOfor the whole learner sample (n= 200) was strong, r= .60 (Pearsons),p< .001, whereas the correlation between VOT and AO (n= 195) wasmedium strong, r= .47,p< .001. As shown, AO emerged as the strongest

predictor of the learners UA of grammatical and phonetic intuition,and the correlations between GJT or VOT and any of the other threeindependent variables (i.e., LOR, L1 USE, and AGE) were weak andsometimes statistically nonsignificant (one apparent exception wasthe AGE variable). When the two AO groups were analyzed separately,it became clear that AO was a relevant predictor for the early-learnergroup only; for the late-learner group, AO appeared to have had noimpact on their UA. The correlations between AO and GJT or VOT forthe early L2 group were strong, r= .58 and .51, respectively,p< .001,

whereas for the late L2 group, the correlation coefficients droppedto weak and nonsignificant levels, r= .05 for GJT and .17 for VOT,phigher than the level (.0125) in both cases. In fact, none of the otherindependent variables correlated significantly with the test results inthe late-learner group (again with the apparent exception of AGE, thistime only for VOT).

Figure 2. GJT scores and VOT crossover points plotted against AO.


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It is often held that AO is confounded with other independent vari-ables. For example, lower AOs tend to coincide with longer residence inthe new country, high amounts of L1 use are more common among latelearners, and AO generally correlates closely with participants ages atthe time of testing (see, e.g., Stevens, 2006). Therefore, it is often heldthat it is difficult to decide whether the AO function should be explainedby maturation or by these other experiential factors that are hidden in

the AO complex. Indeed, as shown in Table 1, participants in the AO115 group were significantly younger than those in the AO 1630 group(mean AGE = 34 vs. 46 years), and the AO 115 group had spent afew more years in Sweden than the AO 1630 group (mean LOR = 26 vs.23 years), although it should be noted that the amount of daily Spanishuse was the same for both AO groups. In fact, as shown in Table 4, AO,LOR, and AGE tend to be interrelated in different ways, and AO and AGEin particular were highly correlated (r= .75,p< .001). To tease apart thedifferent impacts of AO and the other independent variables, partial

correlations were performed, which removed the effect of the con-founding variable. These are presented in Table 5. As can be seen, whenthe effects of other independent variables are removed, AO clearlyemerges as the strongest variable, with strong and highly significantcorrelations with both GJT and VOTthis is especially true for the AO115 group, which was described as the real locus of AO effects. Most

Table 3. Simple correlations (Pearsons r) between GJT scoresVOTcrossover points and the independent variables AO, LOR, L1 USE, andAGE

Correlation withGJT score

Correlation withVOT crossoveri

Learner groupIndependentvariable r p r p

AO 130 n= 200/195i AO .60 < .001 .47 < .001LOR .26 < .001 .14 = .051, nsL1 USE .26 < .001 .21 < .01AGE .38 < .001 .35 < .001

AO 115 n= 101/100i AO .58 < .001 .51 < .001LOR .27 < .01 .25 < .0125L1 USE .28 < .01 .31 < .01AGE .14 = .163, ns .12 = .234, ns

AO 1630 n= 99/95i AO .05 = .623, ns .17 = .1, nsLOR .04 = .694, ns .19 = .065, nsL1 USE .22 = .029, ns .07 = .5, nsAGE .01 = .922, ns .27 < .01

iFive participants (one in the AO 115 group and four in the AO 1530 group) were removed from theVOT data due to missing or uninterpretable data.


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importantly, the effect of AGE has now dropped to nonsignificant levels,which is the case also for LOR and L1 USE, whereas the correlationsbetween AO and GJT or VOT remain more or less unaffected at a robust

.50 to .60 when the effect of confounding variables is removed. In con-trast, none of the independent variables, including AO, can be used toexplain the test results of the AO 1630 grouphere, other (probablyindividual) factors would account for the variation, such as languageaptitude, motivation, and formal instruction.

AO and the Incidence of Nativelike Results

As for the incidence of nativelikeness when the two measures of GJTand VOT are combined and separated, respectively, Table 6 presentsthe numbers and the percentages of L2 participants who performedwithin the range of the 20 native control speakers on both, one, or noneof the two measures of linguistic intuition.3A total of 30 participantshad results within the range of the 20 NSs on both GJT and VOT. Morethan half (55%) of the participants with AO 15 had nativelike results onboth tests, whereas 28% of participants with AO 610 and only 9% of

those with AO 1115 did. More specifically, most participants whopassed as NSs on both GJT and VOT had an AO between 1 and 6 years(22 individuals; see the solid-line frame in Table 6), and none with na-tivelike results on both GJT and VOT had an AO beyond 13 years (seethe long, dotted-line frame).

From the opposite perspective, Table 6 also reveals that only two in-dividuals, or 6%, of the 31 participants with AO 15 were nonnativelikeon both GJT and VOT, whereas the figure is 25% of those with AO 610.For participants with AOs 1130, nonnativelike results on both GJT and

VOT ranged between 48% (AOs 1120) and 55% (AOs 2130). More spe-cifically, grammatical nonnativelikeness in combination with phoneticnonnativelikeness was almost never the case for participants with AOs16 (there were two exceptions at AOs 1 and 5; see the dashed-lineframe); however, nonnativelikeness on both GJT and VOT could be ob-served at all AOs beyond 6 years.4

Table 4. Correlations between independent variables

AO AGE LOR L1 USE

AO 1.00 AGE .75 1.00 LOR .25 .41 1.00 L1 USE .05 .03 .03 1.00


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Table

5.

Firs

t-orderpartialcorrelationsofAOandotherind

ependentvariables(LOR,L1USE,AGE)withGJT-VOT

results

GJTscore

VOTcrossoveri

Learnergroup

Independent

variable

Independentvariable

withAOremoved

AOwithother

independent

variableremoved

Indepe

ndentvariable

with

AOremoved

AOwithother

indep

endent

variable

removed

AO130n=

200

/195i

LOR

.14

.5

7iii

.03

.45iii

L1USE

.2

9iii

.6

1iii

.2

1ii

.47iii

AGE

.13

.5

2iii

.00

.34iii

AO115n=

101

/100i

LOR

.26ii

.5

8iii

.23

.50iii

L1USE

.2

4

.5

7iii

.2

8ii

.49iii

AGE

.23

.6

0iii

.20

.53iii

AO1630n=

99

/95i

LOR

.04

.0

5

.2

1

.19

L1USE

.2

4

.1

1

.1

2

.19

AGE

.0

4

.0

6

.2

2

.04

i Fiveparticipants(oneintheAO115groupandfour

inthe1530group)wereremovedfromt

heVOTdataduetomissin

goruninterpretabledata.

ii =p

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