The Critical Period Hypothesis

Genie

• Found: 13/1970
• Severe social isolation
• Thought to be mentally retarded
• Punished for speech
• 20 words, colours,”stoppit”, „nomore”

Research and socialisation

• Taken into care
• The first year: HOPE
• plural and singular nouns,
• positive and negative sentences
• 2/3-word sentences.

• Chomsky- no 'movement‘( reorganise the underlying declarative sentence)
• Confused her pronouns, 'you' and 'me' interchangeable
• 'Hello‘, 'Thank you‘
• 'Stopit‘, 'Nomore' addressed to herself

Achievements

• Sign language
• Making sense of chaos
• Spatial intelligence
• Social relations
• No apparent
• mental retardation

Support for CPH?

• Severe neglect and emotional trauma
• Possibility of mental retardation
• Right-hemisphere dominance
• Language not lateralised to left-hemisphere: cause or result?

Conclusion

• Is there a CPH in FLA?
• Clear neurological evidence (compensation)
• Suggestive evidence from the deaf
• Feral children - inconclusive

Weak version

• Neurological
• Psychomotor
• Cognitive
• Affective
• Linguistic
• Contextual

Neurological considerations

• Lateralisation
• Time
• - Lenneberg: 2-puberty
• - Krashen: 5
• - Walsh & Diller:
• different timetables for different
• functions

Alternative considerations and counterevidence

• Left/Right cooperation in SLA
• Obler (1981): strategies of acquisition, guessing meaning, formulaic utterances

Psychomotor considerations

• Problems in accent studies
• - native judgement
• - testing isolated utterances,
• controlled language
• Key issue: accent
• - depends on muscular plasticity, subject to CP
• - the Henry Kissinger effect
• - significance? ELF

Cognitive considerations

• Piaget, 1972
• - sharp change from concrete to formal operation at puberty

A watched pot never boils?

• Equilibrium
• Superior cognitive capacity in adults (Ausubel, 1964)
• - a watched pot never boils?
• Rote and meaningful learning

Rosansky, 1975: „Problem-centred learning” of children

Affective considerations

• Attitudes, beliefs, stereotypes,
• Inhibition
• egocentrism – decentration – defending ego

• Motivation
• - internal
• - external
• - integrative
• - instrumental

• Identity (Guiora)
• - face threat
• - second identity
• - language ego
• - permeability of
• language ego

Linguistic considerations

• Bilingualism
• - coordinate vs. compound

Strategies and processes in child L1 and L2 acquisition similar

• similar mistakes in acquisition
• acquisition order (Dulay and Burt, 1974)
• transfer is rare, creative language acquisition
• adults rely more on system of L1

Context

• Learning vs. acquisition
• Input (motherese vs. foreigner talk)
• Peer pressure and group dynamics

Benefits for young learners in instructed FLL

• - Accent (esp. with native speaker)
• - Acquisition (if rooted in activity and ample
• time and + atmosphere available)
• - Low inhibition, communicating in L2:
• natural
• - Natural curiosity
• - Little L1 influence
• - No preconceptions about language and culture

Drawbacks

• No (recognition of) communicative need
• No reliance on reading/writing
• No formal operation
• Difficult to reproduce a rich „here and now”
• context in classroom
• Emergence of speech is to be tolerated
• Difficult to demonstrate a sense of progress
• Highly context and person dependent

Benefits for adults in instructed FLL

• Formal operation: grammar, vocabulary
• Learn through explanation (no exposure)
• L1
• Previous learning strategies
• Controlled motivation, goal orientation
• Not strongly context dependent
• Experience, beliefs might create + attitude
• Faster development, better use of instructional time

Thanks for Attention