Critical Period Hypothesis and Acquisition of Language - Samples

Question: Discuss about the Critical Period Hypothesis and Acquisition of Language. Answer: The process by which the humans acquire the ability to understand and form a sense of a coherent language structure is known as language acquisition, through this process the human beings create and use the wordsto make sentences to communicate with others.Language acquisition most commonly refers tothe acquisition of first language, which deals with the study of the infants and their acquisition of their respective native language. The acquisition of second language differs from the first language acquisition, it deals with the children or the adults learning other languages than native language. There are some theories about the acquisition and development of language in the humans one of which is the Critical Period Hypothesis theorized by Eric Lenneberg, the hypothesis states that there is a certain critical period in the development and acquisition of language in human beings and if that age is crossed then the individual faces certain problems in learning language. This essay w ill argue the importance of the critical age hypothesis in the development of language in humans. Genie started learning language when she was almost 14 years old, after she was discovered it was observed that she had almost no skill in language or proper communication skills. She did not have control over the organs of speech (Curtiss et al., 1974). After she was taught by the linguists and the psychologists her language acquisition showed that even after suffering from tragic isolation for a long period of time and absence of vocabulary or language, she started showing a bit of progress in phonology, she could pronounce several sound sequences while imitating them but she did not use spontaneous speech till five months into the research. She gained quite a bit of vocabulary as well but her grammar did not improve, she could combine two sentences for example cat hurt dog hurt as cat dog hurt but the there was no use of grammar. Her syntactic acquisition, was also much slower than any normal child (Curtiss et al., 1974). The language development of Genie was different from that of the normal children in several aspects. The phonological words were a lot different for Genie than the normal children, the early two syllable words that she spoke were not reduplicated which normal children did speak. She had no intonation and while the normal children learns nouns at first, Genie learned all the nouns pronouns and verbs but was not able to put it into coherent sentences. In the comprehension training she was unable to understand the word order and was also unable to understand passive sentences. She omitted the verbs, objects and subjects from the sentences. In case of negative sentences the words she was able to speak was the angry ones. She was able to say "stop it," "no more," "no," and her stock of negative words were very few (Curtiss et al., 1974). In case of interrogative sentences when she was asked a question she used to respond by repeating the last words of the sentence uttered by the speaker, also she was never able to use any interrogative questions. The study of ASL or American Sign Language is important to contribute to the study of Critical Period Hypothesis as the study of sign language with the deaf and dumb children more evidently proves that the ability of acquiring a language decreases with the increase in age of an individual (Newport, 1990). The three groups of participants in the Newport study were the Native, Early and Late Learners. Native learners who already had exposure to the ASL from their birth, they were raised by their deaf parents and had an idea about the language from a young age. The second were the Early learners who learned ASL after they were taught by their peers who were also deaf at the age of 4-6 (Newport, 1990). The third group comprised of Late learners the first time that they were exposed to ASL was with the help of their deaf peers, they were more than 12 years of age at the time they learned the language or during the period when the tests were conducted (Newport, 1990). The results of the first ASL study suggests that a wide range of studies shows that acquisition of language occurs successfully in the learners after they have overcome certain primary problems (Ron, 2015). The purpose of these experiments were to find out how the language acquisition was affected with the increase of age in the subjects and after the tests were complete it was found that the children who were taught the language at the age of 12 had a lot less improvement in the development of the language, while the children who had early exposure to ASL they showed far better response to the experiments. In case of syntactical and morphological competence an experiment was conducted on the subjects, they had to listen to a recording consisting 276 short and simple sentences and they were asked whether the sentences were correct or not (Newport, 1990). The test score showed that the children who had early exposure to the language were more able in determining which of the sentences were correct and which were wrong, thus proving that the effects of age of acquisition are effects of the maturational state of the learner (Granena, 2016). In the process of comparing both the case studies, the experiments conducted on Genie and the experiments conducted on the deaf children and ASL study proves that the claims made in the Critical Period Hypothesis are true (Mayberry Kluender, 2017). In case of Genie it was seen that although she made some progress in certain aspects of language acquisition yet she had various problems related to phonology, grammar acquisition and in forming interrogative sentence (Choubsaz Gheitury, 2017). Although she made progress the researchers were unable to comment on the extent of improvement of language acquisition process in the future. In the ASL experiments the results were almost similar, the children who had been exposed to the language in their early age they were able top the experiment results (Diaz, 2016). Both of the studies prove that to acquire a proper form of language the individuals are required to be exposed to their respective native languages from an early age (Strid, 2017) . To conclude, it can be said that the critical period hypothesis which says that from childhood throughout adolescence, this period of time is perfect and most suitable for the acquisition of first and even second language acquisition. The external and inter factors prevent the adults to acquire a new language at that age. Judging from both the experiments this statement can be said to be true that Critical Period Hypothesis holds paramount importance in the development of language in human beings. References Choubsaz, Y., Gheitury, A. (2017). Is semantics affected by missing a critical period? Evidence from the Persian deaf.Journal of psycholinguistic research,46(1), 77-88. Curtiss, S., Fromkin, V., Krashen, S., Rigler, D., Rigler, M. (1974). The linguistic development of Genie.Language, 528-554. Diaz, C. (2016). The critical period hypothesis. Granena, G. (2016). Part 1: Age Differences, Maturational Constraints, and Implicit and Explicit L2 Learning.Major Research Issues in SLA, 9. Mayberry, R. I., Kluender, R. (2017). Rethinking the critical period for language: New insights into an old question from American Sign Language.Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1-20. Newport, E. L. (1990). Maturational constraints on language learning.Cognitive science,14(1), 11-28. Ron, C. (2015). Relationship between the Phonetic Aspect of Second Language Acquisition and Age: Testing on the Critical Period Hypothesis in a Selected Function of Language.The annals of Gifu Shotoku Gakuen University. Faculty of Foreign Languages,54, 15-28. Strid, J. E. (2017). The Myth of the Critical Period.TESOL Journal,8(3), 700-715.