Critical Period Hypothesis

Critical Period Hypothesis

Introduction
- What is critical period?
It is a fixed period of time between early childhood and puberty during which a child can
acquire a native language easily, swiftly ,and without external intervention.
-

Critical period hypothesis is the theory that states that there is a window of time .

In other words, critical period suggests that language is biologically basedand that late
exposure alters the fundamental organization of the brain for language.

Dramatic cases of wild or feral children like Victor(1798) The wild boy of Aveyron, Amala
and kamala (1920), Genie (1970), Chelsea(deaf-31) all showed linguistic inability.

This linguistic inability was grammatical inability and not necessary all aspects of
language.

CP applies on learners of ASL.

CP is also not species-specific(some birds develop their bird song during biologically
determined window of time).

Another term is used for critical period is sensitive period which predicts sensitivity or
language gradual attainment (onset peak - offset) rather than absolute drop-off.

Critical Period and L2A

-

These observations were first noted by Lennenberg(1967) and Penfield and Roberts (1959) .

- CPH concerns both L1A and L2A which suggests children success with both L1A and L2A
opposite to adults partial failure :
- native like attainment is impossible to achieve.
- L2 most successful adult/late learners have detectable and identifiable accents and make
occasional morphological and collocations errors not heard from native speakers.
- This triggeres a main argument/question : Why adult L2A is often difficult and incomplete although they
have advantage in most cognitive activities?

2- Successful L2 learning require markedly more effort before a certain

maturational point.
Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson(2000;152)indicate that older learners need more conscious and
labored effort to acquire language.
Krashen(1975 :220) argue that adult learners at formal operations need to construct a
conscious theory.of the language he is learning.

CPH introduces three common advanced views of adult L2A

1- L2 learners are no longer able to attain a native-like levels of
proficiency after a certain maturational point.
Birdsong(1992):15 out of 20 fell within native like pronunciation.
Loup(1995):Arabic learner adult achieved native like performance in some area.
Bongaerts et al.(1995): Dutch learners of English / after the age of 12.
Bongaerts et al.(1997) ; Moyers(1999) ; Palmen(1997) ; Bongaerts et al.(2000)

3- L2 learning is no longer subserved by the same mechanisms that

subserve child language acquisition after a certain maturational point.
- Post-pubertal L2 language learning has no access to UG principles and parameters.
Liu et al.(1992) (20yrs.transfer Chinese processing strategies into English)
Harley and Hartss (1997) investigated the role of aptitude.
Kim et al.(1997) used magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the spatial representation of
L1 and L2 in the cerebral cortex of early and late bilinguals during sentence- generation task.

Studies
Ultimate Attainment in L2 Pronunciation :The Case of very advanced Late L2
Learners
(Three studies on Dutch learners ( after 18 yrs) of French or English)

Reexamining The Critical period Hypothesis : A Case Study of Successful Adult

SLA in a Naturalistic Environment

References:
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