The age issue has been with us for some time, and Singleton and Lengyel's six-papervolume indicates it will accompany us into the next millennium. In the L1A = L2A spirit of the1970s, nonlinguistic accounts for age differences were offered. Yet if factors such as anxiety orego permeability are responsible for lack of L2 success after a certain age, studies of postpubertyfailure either point to the difficulty of reducing affective factors to prepuberty levels or,alternatively, offer support for a neurobiologically based Critical Period. These studiesnotwithstanding, it is helpful to return to the original question: Is the outcome of adult L2acquisition always failure?