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THE AGE FACTOR IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION.DavidSingleton and Zsolt Lengyel. Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1995. Pp. viii +160.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1997

Martha Young-Scholten
Martha Young-Scholten
Affiliation:
University of Durham
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Abstract

The age issue has been with us for some time, and Singleton and Lengyel's six-paper volume indicates it will accompany us into the next millennium. In the L1A = L2A spirit of the 1970s, nonlinguistic accounts for age differences were offered. Yet if factors such as anxiety or ego permeability are responsible for lack of L2 success after a certain age, studies of postpuberty failure either point to the difficulty of reducing affective factors to prepuberty levels or, alternatively, offer support for a neurobiologically based Critical Period. These studies notwithstanding, it is helpful to return to the original question: Is the outcome of adult L2 acquisition always failure?

Type
REVIEWS
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 1997 , pp. 406 - 407
Copyright
1997 Cambridge University Press

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