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Emile comments on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 - Less Wrong Discussion
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As far as I know, the degree to which second-language speakers can acquire native-like competence in domains other than phonetics is somewhat debated. Anecdotally, it's a rare person who manages to never make a syntactic error that a native speaker wouldn't make, and there are some aspects of language (I'm told that subjunctive in French and aspect in Slavic languages may be examples) that may be impossible to fully acquire for non-native speakers.
So I wouldn't accept this theoretical assertion without further evidence; and for all practical purposes, the claim that you have to learn a language as a child in order to become perfect (in the sense of native-like) with it is true.
Not my downvotes, but you're probably getting flak for just asserting stuff and then demanding evidence for the opposing side. A more mellow approach like "huh that's funny I've always heard the opposite" would be better received.
Indeed, I probably expressed myself quite badly, because I don't think what I meant to say is that outrageous: I heard the opposite, and anecdotally, it seems right - so I would have liked to see the (non-anecdotal) evidence against it. Perhaps I phrased it a bit harshly because what I was responding to was also just an unsubstantiated assertion (or, alternatively, a non-sequitur in that it dropped the "native-like" before fluency).