First Language Acquisition, Part 2

Question 1

Critical period

Answer 1

limited time period during which it’s possible to acquire language to native like levels

Question 2

What is the critical period for humans?

Answer 2

Birth to onset of puberty (about 13 years old)

Question 3

Blakemore and Cooper study (1970)

Answer 3

Two week old kittens were assigned to either a vertical or horizontal condition (vertical or horizontal stripes)
Kept in striped containers for 5 hours and then left in a dark room for the rest of the rime
Results: unlike a normal kitten, it has no visual placing abilities
After a few days of living in a normal environment, this effect went away
However, they can only respond to stripes that corresponded to where they were kept
E.g. horizontal condition couldn’t see vertically oriented objects

evidence of a critical period ofr vision as well

Question 4

Case of Genie

Answer 4

Had been confined by her father in a small room without care or socialization
Had no linguistic input
Was able to learn to communicate a message after training
By 17 yrs old she had the vocab of a five year old
She could not learn how to use grammatical morphemes (e.g. the, a -ed) or complex syntactic structures
Completed dichotic listening task on Genie
Showed language processing in the right hemisphere (instead of the normal left hemisphere)
Suggests a critical period

Question 5

Why would we hesitate to make strong claims about a critical period in the case of Genie?

Answer 5

Cases like Genie involve severe abuse so it’s not clear if the language deficits are related to this or a critical period

Question 6

Case of Chelsea

Answer 6

Born deaf but misdiagnosed as mentally retarded
At 31 she was finally diagnosed as deaf
Developed vocab of over 200 words
Has a job, can read and write
Can’t acquire word ordering or complex syntax
This is a stronger case for a critical period because she was raised in a supportive environment

Question 7

Critical period for sign language

Answer 7

If a critical period exists we’d expect that children who learn sign language at infancy should be better than those who learn it later

Question 8

Mayberry Study (2011)

Answer 8

Researchers compared 3 groups of signers
- Native signers
-Early ASL learners
-Delayed ASL learners

All groups had learned for more than 20 years

Asked participants to determine if sentences were grammatical
Early learners performed worse than natives and delayed learners performed worse than both groups

Question 9

Second language acquisition: Olympa study (1976)

Answer 9

Italian immigrants learning english

Age of arrival a better predictor of comprehension than number of years speaking

Question 10

Childhood aphasia

Answer 10

Lenneberg’s results for left hemisphere aphasias as a function of age

0-3 months: no effect
21-36 months: language accomplishments disappear; later re-acquired with repetition of all stages
3-10 years: aphasic symptoms, tendency for full recovery
11+: aphasic symptoms persist

Supports that lateralization is tied to the critical period