by Mouhcine Azizoun

Created on: March 15, 2010   Last Updated: March 17, 2010

Critical Period Hypothesis gives us a clear answer of why childhood is a critical period for language learning.  The hypothesis claims that the first years of childhood are the best time to acquire a language.  After these years, children will not be able to do that effectively.  But what are the evidence that underpin this hypothesis?

According to Noam Chomsky, children are not born with a “blank slate” or tabula rasa.  They have Language Acquisition Device (LAD).  In other words, children are endowed with certain abilities that make acquiring language easy.  It is really amazing how children learn to speak a language easily even though they do not read books or go to classes.  They are not exposed to a huge input data of the language, but they still acquire it well.  How do they do that?

LAD gives the answer to this logical question.  The innate abilities children are born with help them acquire language.  These abilities start to work when triggered by the exposure to a certain environment.  Exposure is of paramount importance because it is the only thing from the outside world that kids need to learn a language.

What happens if kids do not get exposed to a language in that period? The answer is simple: They do not acquire any language.  The cases of Genie and other feral children support this claim.  Genie for example was locked inside her bedroom for most of her childhood and she did not have exposure to any language.  Later on, when discovered by Los Angeles authorities, she could not learn any language.  More importantly, she could not master any grammatical structure.

Grammar is very important.  If one does not master it, she or he won’t be able to use the language.  The critical period for learning grammatical structure of one’s first language is the childhood.  If children do not get exposed to a language after that, they will not learn it even if they get exposed to the language again.

We can say that the innate abilities children are endowed with are not long-lived.  To put it rather differently, after a certain age, these abilities start to disappear.  The evidence to this is that the generality of adult learners never reach a native-like level of any language they study even if they get a lot of the language input.  Children on the other hand, do not get a huge input and yet they start to speak fluently.

This does not

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