is there a critical period in language acquisition?

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Language acquisition is the study of the processes which humans go through to learn and acquire language (Whitney, 1998). Many scientists believe that there may be a critical period for language acquisition, meaning that there is a time limit in which humans must be exposed to language if they are to acquire it normally. Research for a critical period in language comes from studies on the learning of a second language, sign language, and feral children. Using these areas, it can be investigated whether it is the case that human beings who have not acquired language before a certain age cannot require it thereafter.

Many people have the ability to learn and speak more than one language. There is a lot of evidence suggesting that the earlier people are exposed to a second language, the more fluently they are able to speak it. Paradis and Genesee (1996, cited in Whitney, 1998) found that children who learn a second language from an early age are able to not get confused between their two languages, and seem to have better knowledge and understanding of the ways in which language works compared with monolingual children (Reynolds, 1990; cited in Whitney, 1998). This suggests that the critical period for language acquisition is important for learning a second language, and if the critical period is passed then it is a much harder and slower process to speak more than one language.

        Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle (1978, as cited in Whitney, 1998) found that adults tend to perform better than children in the early stages of learning a second language. To begin with, adults quickly learn to produce sentences in a second language, whereas young children can take months to learn a new language (Whitney, 1998). However, the initial advantage that adults have over children is temporary as in the long-term children have the main advantage as the younger the exposure to a second language, the higher the level of mastery achieved. (Johnson and Newport, 1989; as cited in Whitney, 1998). In Johnson and Newport’s 1989 study, individuals with a first language of Chinese and Korean were tested on their level of mastery of the English language. All participants were exposed to the English language for ten years, but their ages varied. It was found that those who were introduced to the English language before the age of seven performed just as well as native English speakers. As age increased, performance of English decreased suggesting that a second language must be learnt before the critical period of language acquisition ends, which in this case appears to be around the age of seven.

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Bates and MacWhinney (1981, as cited in Saville-Troike, 2006) provide an alternative explanation to the critical period theory for how languages are learnt, called the competition model. This approach suggests that all linguistic performance involves mapping, and competition tends to occur between these mappings. This causes interference between an old language and a new language, making it extremely difficult to learn more than one language.

 Another explanation comes from Newport (1990, as cited in Leonard, 2000) who proposed a “less is more” hypothesis which suggests that children have the ability to learn and understand grammatical rules of language in the ...

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