When we dissociate ourselves from our natural instincts to embellish the abilities of children (especially whey they are our own!), we can see many ways in which older learners have an advantage, especially when we are talking about second (or foreign) language acquisition. For an illustration, let us contrast the abilities of a four-year-old child and his thirty-four-year-old mother, and let us imagine that both of them are native speakers of English who have just moved to a Spanish speaking country. All things being equal, who will have the greater vocabulary after a week, a month, a year? The childıs cognitive and linguistic ability is limited by his young age, whereas the mother has fully developed cognitive abilities and already knows tens of thousands of English words. She immediately can transfer this knowledge to her learning of Spanish through the many cognates the two languages share; furthermore, she can also transfer her knowledge of English grammar to her attempts to decipher Spanish syntax. As an adult, she also knows how to hold conversations, how to vary her language depending on differing sociolinguistic situations, and how to use language pragmatically (e.g. how to make requests without using a question: "the TV seems a little loud"= "could you lower the volume on the TV?"). Perhaps the most dramatic advantage the mother has is her literacy. She already knows how to read and write in one language, and in this particular example, her literacy in English gives her an advantage in Spanish. Even if we choose another example and have the mother and son move from the U.S. to China for a year, the fact that she is literate gives her many distinct advantages over her son. She can distinguish print from other similar looking symbols; she can make intelligent guesses, etc. Her son is unable to use any of these resources in his acquisition of Chinese because of his cognitive immaturity and because of his limited sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and literacy skills.

Even in the area of pronunciation, where the child may be either quicker or more accurate than his mother, the reputed advantages of younger learners are suspect. Until about the first decade of life, children have not fully acquired the phonology of their first language, and this limitation is also evident in their attempts to speak a second. In contrast, the mother can pronounce difficult phonemes fluently (the "th" sound which is found in both English and several Spanish dialects), and she can easily produce polysyllabic words. Again, it is only in the ultimate ability to sound like a native speaker where the sonıs linguistic precocity will eventually supersede his motherıs, but this is not achieved without enormous cost. Only after the mother and son have lived for about a decade in a Spanish-speaking environment, and only after the son has continual and rich exposure to Spanish will he eventually emerge, in this case at the age of fourteen, sounding like a native speaker of Spanish, whereas his mother will end up being very fluent in all Spanish skills but with a detectable foreign accent. Children are wonderful and winsome learners, but if we consider all the many complex skills that go into successful communicative competence in a second language, overall, older learners have a distinct advantage.