Age of Immersion Effect on Second Language Phonological Acquisition: A Rare Case Study

Abstract

This paper integrates and critically reviews current literature on the age effect on second language (L2) phonology. It adds new data to the discussion as it cites a rare case of a Saudi child who was mistakenly raised by a Turkish family for four years and five months due to a hospital malpractice. At the time of the study, he was learning his real family language, Arabic, as an L2. The main focus of this paper is to examine the effect of age of immersion on second language phonology after the cutoff of his first language (L1), investigating the availability of foreign accent. The findings indicate that the case has crossed the boundary into native-level performance from a native speaker’s perspective. Nevertheless, the child’s production differs in a statistically significant way from that of the control group. Foreign accent was detected in his controlled production, depicting a possible effect of age of immersion on second language phonology.