Critical Period Hypothesis Essay

The critical period hypothesis is still accepted and supported by many experts in the field of linguistics and language acquisition, although it has become somewhat discredited in recent years. There has been no groundbreaking evidence supporting the critical period hypothesis in recent times, although the theory that ‘younger is better’ is still considered to be true, and this is where the ‘age of onset’ theory is introduced.

2.4 Age of Onset

The theory that ‘younger is better’ is still widely accepted by experts in the field of linguistics, although this does not fall under the Critical Period Hypothesis. Further research on second language acquisition suggests that the older the language learner, the longer it takes to fully attain a language,

Lenneberg created a link between foreign accent and the age which one begins to learn a second language. In Biological Foundations of Language, Lenneberg discusses how a child who begins to learn a second language at the age of 3 or 4 could be taught to speak it with no foreign accent. Contrastingly, a child who begins to learn a second language at 12 years of age is highly unlikely to ever speak the language accent-free.

Flege (1987) found that there was not adequate literature available to accept the concept of ‘an age-based limitation on eventual proficiency that can be attained by learners in a second language’. He did, however, promote a different but equally relevant theory, all the while supporting that a greater accent will be attained the younger the language is introduced. He theorised that the varying ability of children and adults to pronounce sounds from a second language is connected to the fact that the phonetic categories of the child’s first language are still in development, in comparison to that of an adult, where the already developed phonetic categories of their first language are rigidly implanted in the brain. In the case of children, this allows for the development of the phonetic categories of their second language, provided they are exposed to the spoken