Foreign Accents, Language Acquisition, and Cerebral Dominance Revisited

Scovel (1969) has suggested that three factors are universally true of all speech communities : (1) that all children are equally competent in the acquisition of second languages without a ‘foreign accent”; (2) that, while adults vary in the skill with which they acquire foreign languages, few adults ever rid themselves completely of foreign accents; (3) that adults can all recognize a foreign accent in their native language. Scovel has explained these factors by proposing that the ability to master the phonetic systems of second languages is lost with the completion of cerebral dominance. Some information in the literature suggests that factors (2) and (3) in particular may not operate in the same way in all human societies, and that lines of explanation alternative to the cerebral dominance theory may have to be considered, based on further research in societies where language and phonation do not have the same functions that they have in American English speech communities.