Saito, Kazuya; (2022) Age Effects in Spoken Second Language Vocabulary Attainment Beyond the Critical Period. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 10.1017/S0272263122000432. (In press).

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Abstract

The current study set out to examine to what degree age of acquisition (AOA), defined as a learner’s first intensive exposure to a second language (L2) environment, mediates the final state of post-pubertal, spoken vocabulary attainment. In Study 1, spontaneous speech samples were elicited from experienced Japanese users of English (n = 41) using story-telling and interview tasks. The samples were analyzed using a range of corpus- and rater-based lexical measures, and compared to the speech of inexperienced Japanese speakers (n = 40) and native speakers of English (n = 10). The results showed that most experienced L2 learners tended to demonstrate nativelike proficiency for relatively easy lexical dimensions of speech (i.e., richness), but that AOA appeared to play a key role in predicting the ultimate attainment of relatively difficult lexical dimensions (i.e., appropriateness). In Study 2, the findings were successfully replicated with experienced L1 Polish users of English (n = 50).

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