A Time to Speak

Behavioral Research Supporting CPH

Below is an example of research that supports CPH.

Johnson and Newport (1989) used immigrants who had stayed for the same number of years in the United States as the subjects of their research to control the number of contact-year to the second language.

The researchers requested the subjects to carry out grammatical judgment task. Results showed that people who migrated to the U.S. at the age of 3–7 demonstrated similar proficiency as the control group with English as a mother tongue.

For the group aged 8–16, there was a decline in proficiency as the age increased. And for people who migrated to the U.S. after the age of 16, they showed the worst result.

Because the study was conducted with control of the number of years of stay of the immigrants in the U.S., it demonstrated that the difference in the results of learning achievement was not due to differences in residence time.

Therefore, Johnson and Newport believed that the level of proficiency of a second language is related to the age of acquisition, showing that a critical period exists in the course of learning a second language.

The above-mentioned research is often considered as evidence to support CPH. Researchers who considered the existence of a “language learning critical period” (Lenneberg, 1967; Penfield & Roberts, 1959; Scovel, 1988; Seliger, 1983) postulated that for learning the second language, the younger is better.

They believed that it is effortless for children to learn a second language; for adults, it would require a lot of time and effort and results might not even be good.

However, in all these studies, no consistent supporting evidence was obtained for the specific time of the critical period, the decedent step function before and after the critical period, and the inability to master the second language to a degree similar to the performance of a native speaker after the critical period.

On the contrary, it is easy to find disproof from many behavior and neuroscience studies to rebut the idea of the “language learning critical period”.

References

Birdsong, D. & Molis, M. (2001). On the evidence for maturational constraints in second-language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 235–249.

Flege, J.E., Yeni-Komshian, G.H., & Liu, S. (1999). Age constraints on second-language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 78–104.

Hakuta, K., Bialystok, E. & Wiley, E. (2003). Critical evidence: a test of the critical period hypothesis for second language acquisition. Psychological Sciences, 14, 31–38.

Johnson, J.S. & Newport, E.L. (1989). Critical period effects in second language learning: the influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as second language. Cognitive Psychology, 21, 60–99.

Johnson, J.S. & Newport, E.L. (1991). Critical period effects on universal properties of language: the status of subjacency in the acquisition of a second language. Cognition, 39, 215–258.

Lenneberg, E.H. (1967). The Biological foundations of language. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Oyama, S. (1976). A sensitive period for the acquisition of a nonnative phonological system. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 5, 261–283.

Penfield, W., & Roberts, L. (1959). Speech and brain mechanisms. New York: Atheneum.

Scovel, T. (1988). A time to speak: A psycholinguistic inquiry into the critical period for human speech. New York: Newbury House.

Seliger, H.W. (1983). On the possible role of the right hemisphere in second language acquisition. TESOL Quarterly, 16, 307–314.

Originally published at http://poeticmindfulness.wordpress.com on September 16, 2020.