The age issue has been with us for some time, and Singleton and Lengyel's six-paper volume indicates it will accompany us into the next millennium. In the L1A = L2A spirit of the 1970s, nonlinguistic accounts for age differences were offered. Yet if factors such as anxiety or ego permeability are responsible for lack of L2 success after a certain age, studies of postpuberty failure either point to the difficulty of reducing affective factors to prepuberty levels or, alternatively, offer support for a neurobiologically based Critical Period. These studies notwithstanding, it is helpful to return to the original question: Is the outcome of adult L2 acquisition always failure?