PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

Second Language Acquisition:

Critical Periods &
Bilingualism
Critical (sensitive) periods
 Certain behavior is developed more quickly
within a critical period than outside of it. This
period is biologically determined.
 Examples:
 Imprinting in ducks (Lorenz, ; Hess, 1973)
 Ducklings will follow the first moving thing they see
 Only happens if they see something moving within the first
few hours (after 32 hours it won’t happen) of hatching
 Binocular cells in humans
 Cells in visual system that respond only to input from both
eyes.
 If these cells don’t get input from both eyes within first year
of life, they don’t develop
Critical (sensitive) periods
 Certain behavior is developed more quickly
within a critical period than outside of it. This
period is biologically determined.
 Some environmental input is necessary for normal
development, but biology determines when the
organism is responsive to that input.
 That “when” is the critical period
Critical period for language
 Lenneberg (1967) proposed that there is a critical
period for human language
 It assumes that language acquisition must occur
before the end of the critical period
 Estimates range from 5 years up to onset of puberty
Evidence for critical period for language
 Feral and Isolated Children
 Children raised in the wild or with reduced exposure to
human language
 What is the effect of this lack of exposure on language
acquisition?
 Two classic cases
 Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron
 Genie
Victor, The Wild Boy of Aveyron
 Found in 1800 near the outskirts of Aveyron, France
 Estimated to be about 7-years-old
 Considered by some to be the first documented case of autism
 Neither spoke or responded to speech
 Taken to and studied by Dr. Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, and
educator of deaf-mute and retarded children
 Never learned to speak and his receptive language ability was
limited to a few simple commands.
 Described by Itard as “an almost normal boy who could not speak”
Genie
 Found in Arcadia, California in 1970, was not
exposed to human language until age 13.5.
 Raised in isolation a situation of extreme abuse
 Genie could barely walk and could not talk when
found
 Dr. Susan Curtiss made great efforts to teach her
language, and she did learn how to talk, but her
grammar never fully developed.
 Only capable of producing telegraphic utterances
(e.g. Mike paint or Applesauce buy store)
 Used few closed-class morphemes and function
words
 Speech sounded like that of a 2-year-old
Genie
 By age of 17 (after 4 years of extensive training)
 Vocabulary of a 5 year old
 Poor syntax (telegraphic speech mostly, few
grammatical words)
 Examples
 Mama wash hair in sink
 At school scratch face
 I want Curtiss play piano
 Like go ride yellow school bus
 Father take piece wood. Hit. Cry.
 No inflectional morphology
 Showed a right hemisphere advantage for speech
(in contrast to the usual left hemisphere advantage)
What Do These Cases Tell Us?
 Suggestive of the position that there is a critical
period for first language learning
 If child is not exposed to language during early childhood
(prior to the age of 6 or 7), then the ability to learn syntax will
be impaired while other abilities are less strongly affected
 Not uncontroversial: Victor and Genie and children like them
were deprived in many ways other than not being exposed
to language
 Genie stopped talking after age 30 and was institutionalized
shortly afterward (Rymer, 1993)
Second language learning
 Learning a new language
 What if we already know one language, but want to learn
another?
 Adults learning another language typically have a persistent
foreign accent – perhaps a critical period for phonology
(Flege & Hillenbrand, 1984)
 Adults typically do better initially at learning a new language
compared to kids, but kids typically do better over the long
term (Krashen, Long, & Scarcella, 1982)
Second language learning
 Johnson and Newport (1989)
 Native Chinese/Korean speakers moving to US
 Task: Listen to sentences and judge whether
grammatically correct R = -.87

Test score
2 17
Age of arrival
R = -.16

Test score
17 40
Age of arrival
Second language learning
 Johnson and Newport (1989)
 Native Chinese/Korean speakers moving to US
 Task: Listen to sentences and judge whether
grammatically correct
 Concluded that around the age of 16 something
happens
 Different factors operate on language acquisition before
and after the age of 16
 Birdsong and Molis (2001)
 Replicated the Johnson and Newport study in
Spanish/English speakers.
 Did not find a discontinuity around the age of 16
Effects of the Critical Period
 Learning a language:
 Under 7 years: perfect command of the language possible
 Ages 8- c.15: Perfect command less possible progressively
 Age 15-: Imperfect command possible
 But these claims are far from universally accepted
Bilinguals & Polyglots
 Many people speak more than one language
 Tucker (1999) - multilinguals outnumber monolinguals
 What is the impact of knowing/using more than one
language?
 Factors affecting second language acquisition?
 What does the lexicon look like?
 Interesting effects in bilinguals
 Interference

 Code switching

 Cognitive advantages
Second language acquisition
 Contexts of childhood bilingualism
 Simultaneous
 Both languages are acquired at the same time
 Vocabulary growth of bilinguals is similar to that of monolinguals
 Some aspects of acquisition may be slowed, but by age of 4
typically caught up
 Doesn’t seem to matter whether languages are “related” or not
(e.g., English - French versus English Japanese)
 Can achieve “fluency” in both languages
 Sequential acquisition
 The second language is learned after a first language
 When the second language (L2) is acquired is important
 Early versus late learning (e.g., see the Johnson and
Newport study)
Second language acquisition
 Frequency of usage of both languages
 How often and in what contexts do you use the two languages
 “Use it or lose it” - language attrition
 Mode of acquisition
 Native bilingualism - growing up in a two language environment
 Immersion - schooling provided in a non-native language
 Submersion - one learner surrounded by non-native speakers
 Language dominance effects
 Relative fluency of L1 and L2 may impact processing
 Bilingual Representations
 How do we represent linguistic information in a
bilingual lexicon?
 Probably depends on many of the factors just discussed
 Let’s look at some models and research focusing on the
situation where L1 is dominant relative to L2
 Models of the bilingual lexicons
Potter et al (1984): Separate Stores Models – separate
lexicons for each language
Word Association Model Concept Mediation Model
L1=First Language
L2=Second Language
CONCEPTS CONCEPTS

L1 L2 L1 L2
 Models of the bilingual lexicons
Paivio, Clark, & Lambert (1988): Common Stores
Models – words from both languages in same store

L1=First Language
L2=Second Language
CONCEPTS

L1 & L2
 Revised Hierarchical Model
 The results are mixed,
supporting more complex
models
 May be different in different bilinguals
depending on things like age of acquisition, concepts
relative proficiency, etc.

 Kroll & Stewart (1994)

conceptual conceptual
 Proposed that the fluency of links links
L2 needs to be considered in lexical
the processing model links
L1 L2
Interesting effects in bilinguals
 Interference
 Code switching
 Cognitive advantages
Interesting effects in bilinguals
 Interference
 Does knowing two languages lead to interference?
 When found, interference is at multiple levels
 Phonological - least amount of interference
 Lexical - mixing words from different languages
 Initially, appear to use a one word per thing strategy
 But as they realize there that they’re speaking two language,
then they’ll use words from both languages simultaneously
 Syntactic
 Until year two, may use only one syntactic system which is
common to both languages
 Then a brief period with two sets of lexical items, but still a
common syntax
 Finally, two lexicons and two sets of syntax
Interesting effects in bilinguals
 Determine who or what is the one performing the action.
 The waitress pushes the cowboys.
 The telephones pushes the cowboys.
 Kisses the table the apple.
 The baskets the teacher kicks.
 As a native speaker of English we can use many
cues:
 Word order
 Animacy
 Verb agreement
 Not all languages use the same cues to the same
extent
 e.g., German doesn’t rely as much on word order, but
relies more on agreement processes
Interesting effects in bilinguals
 Determine who or what is the one performing the action.
 The waitress pushes the cowboys.
 The telephones pushes the cowboys.
 Kisses the table the apple.
 The baskets the teacher kicks.
 Kilborn (1989, 1994)
 Found that bilinguals (English as second language)
typically carry over the dominant processing strategies
from their native languages.
 This interacts with their level of fluency in the second
language
 Code switching
 When bilinguals substitute a word or phrase from one
language with a phrase or word from another language

“I want a motorcycle VERDE”

 Switching is systematic, not random

 Code switching
 When bilinguals substitute a word or phrase from one
language with a phrase or word from another language

“I want a motorcycle VERDE”

 The Spanish adjective “verde” follows a grammatical rule that is

observed by most bilingual speakers that code-switch

“I want a VERDE motorcycle”

 Would be incorrect
 because language switching can occur only if the adjective is placed
according to the rules of the language of the adjective
 In this case, the adjective is in Spanish; therefore, the adjective must
follow the Spanish grammatical rule that states that the noun must
precede the adjective
 Code switching
 When bilinguals substitute a word or phrase from one
language with a phrase or word from another language

“I want a motorcycle VERDE”

 Generally, bilinguals take longer to read and comprehend
sentences containing code-switched words
 May be due to a “mental switch mechanism” that determines which
of the bilingual’s two mental dictionaries are “on” or “off” during
language comprehension.
 This mental switch is responsible for selecting the appropriate mental
dictionary to be employed during the comprehension of a sentence.
 E.g., if reading an English, a Spanish code-switched word is

encountered, the mental switch must disable the English linguistic

system, and enable the Spanish linguistic system.
 Code switching
 When bilinguals substitute a word or phrase from one
language with a phrase or word from another language

“I want a motorcycle VERDE”

 Generally, bilinguals take longer to read and comprehend
sentences containing code-switched words
 This time difference depends on similarity of the languages
 Chinese-English bilinguals take longer to recognize English code-
switched words in Chinese sentences only if the English words contain
initial consonant-consonant (e.g., flight) clusters, simply because the
Chinese language lacks this phonotactic structure.
 Another current view suggests that language dominance (i.e., which
language is used more frequently) plays an important role in code-
switching
 Cognitive advantages
 Some evidence suggest that being bilingual can have
an impact on cognition outside of language
 Bialystok and colleagues
 Bilinguals are very proficient at switching between languages
 Bilinguals also have to be good at suppressing the contextually
inappropriate language