Complexities and Interactions of Age Effects in L2 Learning: Broadening the Research Agenda

This special issue gathers together a collection of studies that broadens the re-search agenda and debates in the area of age studies in second language (L2) learning (see Muñoz and Singleton 2011). The contributions point to the cur-rent breadth and wealth of approaches to age effects, from those that predom-inantly rely on a maturational constraint explanation to those that propose a multi-factor explanation focusing their attention on the interaction of age with a multiplicity of factors. In different ways, the contributions challenge Lenneberg’s (1967) traditional view of a critical period ending around puberty. Some move the cut-off points of the proposal, while others investigate whether predetermined limits can be removed; some underline the moderating role of the learning context and the learner’s orientation and engagement with the language. The seven articles in this issue delve into a variety of age dimensions—age of acquisition (AoA) as the start of significant exposure to an L2, or as the start of instruction of a foreign language (FL), chronological age and aging effects