When learning a new language, speakers often have non-native accents. Linguistic research suggests such accent is shaped by the speaker’s first language that they learned when growing up. Schepens’ team’s research puts new light on just how strong these effects can be.

There’re similar researches from other scientists, but Schepens’ team analyzed a data set of more than 50,000 adults, who learned Dutch as their second or third languages. Besides, these adults came from more than 60 different first language backgrounds. These data were collected through a state exam administered by the Dutch government for foreigners that enter Holland. The exam rated each test taker’s Dutch speaking proficiency(熟练，水平)

The team found that about half of the individual difference in the proficiency of learners could be accounted for by a handful of reasons: the learner’s education and sex(women had higher scores than men), the learner’s age when they arrived in Holland, the time they spent in Holland, and the learner’s first language. This last reason was the most prominent one since it accounts for 50 percent of the explained difference in learners’ proficiency.

What leads to this? Working with professor Hout, Schepens’s team studied the linguistic similarity between Dutch and the 62 first languages spoken by different learners in the database. The huge majority---about 80 percent---of the effect of the language background was explained by linguistic similarity. Of the test takers who grew up speaking Arabic, only about 5 percent scored higher in Dutch speaking proficiency than the worst 50 percent of the test takers that grew up speaking German.

“Our results suggest this is largely due to the fact that German shares many linguistic characteristics with Dutch, but Arabic does not,” says Schepens.

“This suggests a large part of the non-nativeness of a learner is simply due to the language they grew up with, and this reason is entirely out of their control,” says Florian Jaeger. “The result can play a part in language teaching.”

The size of the British Isles often leads people to think that the languages spoken in its countries of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are somewhat the same. At first, visitors are often surprised to find that they have difficulty in understanding the accents(口音）and dialects(方言）of certain regions. Even in England there are many different dialects.

Experts believe that for most English people, the places they come from are very important to them. Accents are clues to where people were born and where they grew up. Although some people may change the way they speak during their lifetime, most people carry at least some evidence of their accents and dialects throughout their lives. In addition to the regional accents of England, there can also be class difference among the accents. People are often able to make instant and unconscious judgments about a stranger’s class by listening to his or her accent. Both the words and the pronunciation of an individual reflect his or her social position.

It is agreed that in England, the kind of English spoken by a person plays a leading role that generally is not important in North America.. The importance of accents and their cultural and social relationships are well represented in films and on television in Britain. The film My Fair Lady based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play Pygmalion is often said to be a wonderful example of how social class and the accent were, and still are, linked in Britain.

While they were still growing up, kids are basically vacuums for vocabulary. It is estimated that a normal kid at the age of 6 possesses a remarkable vocabulary of about thirteen thousand words!

That’s an amazing accomplishment because preliterate children just perceive spoken words and do not have a chance to work on those words. Rather, they learn a fresh vocabulary every 2 hours when awake, regularly. This is particularly extraordinary since the best effective ways for mnemonic devices（记忆术） do not assist with words individually.

A mnemonic has been a training method that changes what we wish to recall to more unforgettable things. For instance, if you desire to get an education on reading music, an easy approach to learning the EGBDF has been recalling the sentence Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. However, that doesn’t apply to individual words. Due to the lack of simple methods to recall words, children’s brains need to have an inherent（固有的）, strong structure for fast learning a language.

But, as we become older, we start to miss those remarkable skills. Every adult finds it difficult at the time of learning a different tongue, as the ability seems to decline with age. A psychologist, Elisa Newport, did research on people who immigrated（移民） to the US. She discovered that the people who immigrated in the age range of 3 — 7 had been as expert in the grammar of English as those who were US-born. But those who arrived in the age range of 8 — 15, did much worse.

A similar thing can be noticed at the time of learning the initial language. In the past, a small number of kids were raised with no human touch, regularly as a result of negligence. They are called the “wolf children”, similar to “Genie”, the girl who was found at the age of 13 around 1970. Since she was raised with no human touch, she could not create even simple grammatical sentences.