Ensayos

Critical Period Hypothesis


The critical Period Hypothesis is known as a determined period of time in which a child must be espoused to a language environment in order that she or he can acquiresuch good language skills that they could produce and understand what its world provide them.
The Critical Period Hypothesis supports that there is a crucial time in which an individual in order toacquire successfully language skills must be interacting with a rich linguistic environment; nevertheless, if there is not exposure until this time is over, the individual will never achieve a fullcommand of language, especially grammatical systems.
Linguistics have been attracted by this phenomenon, and it has been studied for decades until now, the evidence and the theories that explain thisperiod vary, however it is widely accepted. Pinker proposed “acquisition of a normal language is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, is steadily compromised from them until shortly afterpuberty, and is rare thereafter” (Pinker 1994, p. 293)
In second language acquisition, the evidence that support a critical period hypothesis, is widely related to the impossible native-like accentreaching; although, in some causes it has been evidenced that native-like accent is also affected by multiple factors, not only for the age one, but identity and motivation, rather than a critical periodbiological constraint. (Moyer, 1999; Bongaerts et al., 1995; Young-Scholten, 2002)
The Critical Period Hypothesis was first proposed by Montreal neurologist Wilder Penfield and co-author Lama Robertsin a 1959 paper Speech and brain mechanism, and it was published more openly by Eric Lenneberg in 1967 with Biological Foundations of Language. He gave the theory of the lateralization factor atpuberty as a mechanism which helps with the language acquisition. Moreover, other important researcher of this Critical Period is Noam Chomsky, who said “It does appear that young children have a much...