Personally I agree with those you say that age is an important factor in language acquisition and that younger children learn more proficiently. I recall in a developmental psychology class that I took in university that neural pruning in the first few years of life effect the child's ability to hear phonemes. Once a neuron designed to hear a specific phoneme is pruned, then that individual will never be able to hear that sound later in life. That is why when older people learn a language that uses much different sounds then their native language, it is very challenging to hear and pronounce the subtle differences in accent. In such cases you often hear conversarional exchanges like this - "no it's pronounced this way - (such and such)" followed by the response "that is exactly how I'm saying it."

People cannot say the difference because they cannot hear it.

Posted using Partiko Android