Non-native Features of Near-native Speakers: On the Ultimate Attainment of Childhood L2 Learners

Abstract

Abstract Oral and written second language data from two groups of adolescent bilingual speakers (L1 Finnish/L2 Swedish, L1 Spanish/L2 Swedish respectively) were analyzed and compared to equivalent data from a group of matched monolingual speakers of Swedish. Each group comprised 12 subjects, all of whom were students at upper secondary school level. The bilingual speakers were judged by their teachers to speak Swedish without any noticeable foreign accent in everyday oral conversation. They had all started their second language acquisition before puberty, some at pre-school age ( 7). The bilingual and monolingual speakers had earlier been shown not to differ significantly on measures designed to tap language proficiency in cognitively demanding linguistic tasks (Hyltenstam & Stroud, in preparation). On measures of lexical/grammatical accuracy and appropriateness, however, the topic of the present analysis, there were clear differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers of Swedish. The results in the present paper are presented against the background of the notions of completeness and fossilization. The issue of competence vs. control is also addressed. Furthermore, the relationship between ultimate attainment and age of onset of second language acquisition is treated in some detail.