Age of learning effects on the duration of sentences produced in a second language

Research has shown that L2 utterances diverge increasingly from target lang uage phonetic norms as the age of L2 learning increases. Other research has suggested that L2 speakers produce longer utterances than native speakers. The aim of this study was to determine whether L2 utterance durations incr ease as age of learning increases. Fluently produced English sentences spok en by 240 native speakers of both Italian and Korean (selected on the basis of age of arrival [AOA]) were examined. For both L1 groups, the duration o f English sentences was positively correlated with AOA. The AOA effect was found to be significant even when confounding variables were partialed out. These results are taken as preliminary support for the proposal that the m ore established the L1 is at the time of first exposure to the L2, the more it will interfere with L2 production, thus requiring greater processing re sources to suppress it.