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> Up to age 12 or so you can learn a second language accent-free, but at that age an important developmental milestone cements phonemes in place. This is only

by omeid2 3y ago

> Up to age 12 or so you can learn a second language accent-free, but at that age an important developmental milestone cements phonemes in place. This is only true if the second language has sounds that you don't have in your first language.

dbcurtis 3y ago
Can you name a language pair where that works? I can’t think of one.
- iopq 3y ago
  If your native language is Ukrainian, when you learn Russian you don't get more phonemes, unless you count slightly different mouth positions of vowels.
- dataflow 3y ago
  https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30633 https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/30633
mrtree 3y ago
[dead]
Tor3 3y ago
Oh, right. I forgot all those Dutch speed skaters who used to train in Norway a couple of generations back. Ard Schenk.. Kees Verkerk and many others. The majority of them learned Norwegian completely accent-free (you really had to listen to figure out they weren't native), despite not learning the language as kids. I figured that must have been because Dutch has such a variety of native sounds that it basically covers Norwegian language sounds.