THE CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS

What is the critical period hypothesis? The CPH is a hypothesis that mentions that there is a critical period in which certain skills must be attained, acquired, or learned. This means that after a certain age, these skills can no longer be acquired by their learners. First of all, we need to know what a critical period is in order to understand the topic. Second Language Acquisition posits that there is a critical period, early childhood until puberty, in which human beings must acquire a second language if they are going to achieve native-like attainment in that language which they are learning, according what I read, I found these one which says It is a maturational time period during some crucial experience will have its peak effect on development or learning, resulting in normal behavior attuned to the particular environment to which the organism has been exposed. That is why the children acquire the language easier than adults because they are exposed into language environment since they were children. The critical period appear when we are out of the rage to acquire the native accent after the puberty, normally acquired a language during critical period early in life and puberty is easy to get a native accent from the language, outside this period is a long process of acquire or learning the native accent with difficulty. As a second language learner, we are capable to acquire the language because we start this process during puberty, I know that we are not going to be likely to acquire a native-like pronunciation or acquire the native accent but we can get a closer accent which is English standard, in case of adult acquire the native or closer accent it can be difficult because they have already developed their formal thinking, their organism I meant their brain, remaining we need to be exposure to the English environment in order to learn the language. So as you notice the age take an important part of acquire the language with the correct environment stimulation depending in which environment you are because if you are exposed to the language environment, according to research, however, individuals person who start with their study of a second language after this critical period show marked performance deficits in the language, most notably the lack of a native-like accent otherwise they will never be able to fully acquire. References Lenneberg (1967) and Bickerton (1981) (Bialystok 1997; Singleton & Lengyel 1995; Scovel 1988, 1999 for usefull summaries)

By: HERSON ASMEL CASTRO RIVAS