- Title
- The Critical Period Hypothesis revisited
- Creator
- Moskovsky, Christo
- Relation
- 2001 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. Proceedings of the 2001 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (Canberra 27-30 September, 2001)
- Relation
- http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2001.html
- Publisher
- Australian Linguistic Society
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2002
- Description
- The Critical Period (CP) Hypothesis in essence contends that the ability to learn a language is limited to the years before puberty after which, most probably as a result of maturational processes in the brain, this ability disappears. Since Penfield & Roberts (1959), and especially since Lenneberg (1967), this has been one of the most hotly debated issues in psycholinguistics and, generally, in cognitive science. In an already imposing body of literature on CP there are a large variety of views on the nature of the phenomenon (e.g. whether it is a critical, a sensitive, or an optimal period), on its origin (e.g. whether it is caused by maturational or cognitive or some other factors), on its onset and completion times, etc. and, while the importance of such issues is acknowledged, they will not be addressed here. The principal goal of this paper is rather to consider some of the existing arguments against CP for second language (SL) acquisition in a framework which, following some recent proposals (e.g. Bley-Vroman 1989, Schachter 1996), assumes that first and second language acquisition are two fundamentally different processes.
- Subject
- Critical Period Hypothesis; language learning; psycholinguistics; second language acquisition
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/35371
- Identifier
- uon:3892
- Identifier
- ISSN:1446-2265
- Language
- eng
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