1 / 12

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.

damien
Download Presentation

The Critical Period Hypothesis

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  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

More Related