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The Critical Period Hypothesis

The Critical Period Hypothesis. Critical period or critical periods?. The basic claim Evidence for L1: feral children Lenneberg, 1967 Bickerston, 1981 L2: L2 learning and acquisition Bialystok, 1997, Singleton & Lengyel, 1995. Feral children.

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The Critical Period Hypothesis

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  1. The Critical Period Hypothesis

  2. Critical period or critical periods? The basic claim Evidence for L1: feral children Lenneberg, 1967 Bickerston, 1981 L2: L2 learning and acquisition Bialystok, 1997, Singleton & Lengyel, 1995

  3. Feral children • Socialising, teaching and observing • Problems - ethical experiments? - teacher=researcher (bias) - relation between lack of language and mental + social retardation

  4. Kamala and Amala • Found: 1920 (India) • Age: 8 years and 18 months • Taken into care • Limited vocabulary • Unusal words • No spontaneous use • No syntax

  5. Genie • Found: 1970 (California) • Age: 13 • Taken into care • Fast progress in vocabulary • Sign language • Making sense of chaos • Spatial intelligence • No apparent mental retardation

  6. Aspects of study • Neurological • Psychomotor • Cognitive • Affective • Linguistic • Contextual

  7. Neurological considerations • Lateralisation • Time - Lenneberg 2-puberty - Krashen 5 - Walsh & Diller (1981): different timetables for different functions • Right - hemisphere functioning in SLA - - Obler, 1981: strategies of acquisition, guessing meaning, formulaic utterances • Lots of counterevidence - Hill, 1970, Sorenson, 1967 - multilingual tribes

  8. Psychomotor considerations • Problems in accent studies - native judgement - testing isolated words and sentences • Key issue: accent - depends on muscular plasticity, subject to CP - the Kissinger effect

  9. Cognitive considerations • Piaget, 1972 - sharp change from concrete to formal operation at puberty - CP!! (+ or -??) • Superior cognitive capacity in adults (Ausubel, 1964) - a watched pot never boils? • Rosansky, 1975 - „Problem-centred learning” of children • Piaget - equilibrium for children and adults? • Rote and meaningful learning

  10. Affective considerations • Attitudes, beliefs, stereotypes, • Inhibition - egocentrism – decentration-defending ego • Identity (Guiora, language ego) - face threat - second identity - permeability of language ego

  11. Linguistic considerations • Bilingualism • Strategies and processes in child L1 and L2 acqusition similar • Adults demonstrate similar mistakes - acquisition order (Dulay and Burt, 1974), - transfer is rare, creative langauge acquisition - adults rely more on system of L1

  12. Context • Learning vs. acquisition • Motivation for learning • Input (motherese vs. foreigner talk) • Peer pressure

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