3.4 Critical Periods in a Second Language

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来自 University of Houston System 的课程

The Bilingual Brain

179 个评分

University of Houston System

The Bilingual Brain

179 个评分

This course explores the brain bases of bilingualism by discussing literature relevant to differences in age of initial learning, proficiency, and control in the nonverbal, single language and dual-language literature. Participants will learn about the latest research related to how humans learn one or two languages and other cognitive skills.

从本节课中

Week 3

Office Hours 319:22

3 Laying Down Two Languages Across Time2:00

3.1 Let There Be Sound16:45

3.2 Phonology in a Second Language16:07

3.3 Grammar1:34

3.4 Critical Periods in a Second Language3:30

3.5 AoA and Orphaned Language10:54

3.6 Grammatical Proccessing and AoA11:50

3.7 Isolating AoA2:07

3.8 Grammatical Gender3:04

3.9 Camparing First and Second Language7:52

与讲师见面

Arturo E. Hernandez
Professor
Psychology

In 1989 Newport and Johnson published a study that's been quite controversial, but

has really indicated the difference in

age of acquisition of a second language, and it's effect on grammatical processing.

So in their study, what they wanted to do was to ask people to process a series of

sentences and indicate whether they were grammatical or not.

Some of these sentences had simple errors, like, I brought some pig to the market.

Others had more complex sentences like, the man climbed the ladder up carefully.

They split the group up into those who had learned the second langauge before the age

of 15, and those who would learn the second language after the age of 17.

And they asked a very straight forward question.

What was their grammatical score based on the age at which they learned English?

What they found was that the early second language learners, and

the monolinguals got almost all of them correct.

And as they looked at successively older learners of a second language, so

these are adults who had learned a second language later in life.

Right, later in childhood, or in, into adulthood.

That number dropped as they got older.

When they looked at the line, and they drew a line across these different groups,

they found that between three and seven, the score on

this schematical task dropped a little bit every year.

And then after seven, it just dropped precipitously.

So the idea was that somehow, between three and seven,

there was an effect of having had a little bit more exposure to the language,

but then after age seven, it just dropped off.

Suggesting again that this age seven might be an important cut off for

the ability to learn the language in a more native like matter.

In this case, they suggested that it might be the closing of a critical period,

a point at which grammar can no longer be learned like a native speaker.

The studies have been controversial, but then other researchers and

who've actually asked the question in a slightly different way.

What if we cut them at 20?

And they find slightly different results.

So there's a lot of discussion of whether there's really this critical period.

This age seven at which a window closes.

Interpretation by

others have sort of softened the view, and suggested well, age matters.

Clearly, learning a second language later in life leads to

a lower grammatical score.

I'm not sure that there's a window that we can identify, but

clearly, every age in which a second language is learned, presents with

a different outcome in terms of the ability to detect grammatical mistakes.

So, taken together these studies looking at grammar,

have shown us that age matters.

And we have to leave open the question of exactly when this window closes.

How it closes, but we've established that age does matter and

it does play a roll in grammar

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