What is the best age to start learning an additional language?

David Singleton
Trinity College Dublin

Si vous demandez à des passants quel est le meilleur âge pour apprendre une langue étrangère, la majorité d’entre eux répondront certainement «le plus tôt est le mieux». Cet article montre pourtant que la réponse à cette question est plus complexe. S’il est vrai que, en contexte de migration, les apprenants précoces tendent à atteindre un meilleur niveau sur le long terme que leurs pairs plus âgés, de nombreux exemples montrent que des apprenants tardifs peuvent aussi passer pour natifs de la L2. En ce qui concerne le contexte scolaire, les résultats clairs et consistants de plus de 50 ans de recherche montrent qu’un apprentissage précoce ne confère aucun avantage en comparaison d’un apprentissage plus tardif. 

Most people’s response to the question posed in the title would undoubtedly be “the younger the better”. Nor would this be an unreasonable reaction. After all, first language development is something that happens in infancy and so the general inference is that children are better equipped to acquire languages than adolescents and adults. Indeed, common experience seems to suggest that starting to learn anything early in life – the violin, chess, tennis – may yield substantial advantages. With specific regard to language, we seem to get everyday evidence for this perspective from the way in which immigrant children often act as interpreters in the language of the host country for their parents. This phenomenon has been observed for a very long time. Thus, for example, the British psychologist J.S. Tomb wrote in 1925 about English families in India in the days of the Raj, commenting on the very much greater linguistic proficiency attained by the children as compared with the adults in the various Indian languages. We need to bear in mind in this context that […]