"I have always had a problem speaking English since I started to speak it as my second language at age 27. Early in my teaching career, students occasionally complained about my accent. My department chair once summed up my performance in a line that still rings in my ears: Dr. Sun was a good teacher, but he had an accent."
"There is a name for the stubborn grip of one's mother tongue. It is called imprinting, a form of learning that happens early and is mostly irreversible. The idea entered science through the eccentric brilliance of Konrad Lorenz, who famously persuaded newly hatched goslings to follow him around as if he were their mother. His trick was simple and profound. At the moment of hatching, he made sure he was the only moving object in sight."
Personal experience shows that learning a second language at age 27 left a persistent accent that drew student complaints and a departmental remark that "he had an accent." Family urged greater effort, but biological factors already constrained change. Imprinting describes an early, largely irreversible form of learning demonstrated by Konrad Lorenz with newly hatched goslings that followed him when he was the only moving object visible. Lorenz shared a 1973 Nobel Prize, and initial views of imprinting as an animal curiosity gave way to insights from John Bowlby and later research showing a childhood critical period when neural circuits are tuned to absorb sounds and accents, with reduced plasticity later in life.
Read at Psychology Today
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