Abstract
This article focuses on the uncertainty surrounding the issue of the Critical Period Hypothesis. It puts forward the case that, with regard to naturalistic situations, the hypothesis has the status of both “not proven” and unfalsified. The article analyzes a number of reasons for this situation, including the effects of multi-competence, which remove any possibility that competence in more than one language can ever be identical to monolingual competence. With regard to the formal instructional setting, it points to many decades of research showing that, as critical period advocates acknowledge, in a normal schooling situation, adolescent beginners in the long run do as well as younger beginners. The article laments the profusion of definitions of what the critical period for language actually is and the generally piecemeal nature of research into this important area. In particular, it calls for a fuller integration of recent neurolinguistic perspectives into discussion of the age factor in second language acquisition research.
Highlights
In SLA research, the age at which L2 acquisition begins has all but lost its status as a simple quasi-biological attribute and is widely recognized to be a ‘macrovariable’ (Flege et al 1999; cf. Birdsong 2018)—in other words, a complex combination of sociocultural and psychological variables
We explore a number of areas, concluding that in the naturalistic sphere, the critical period notion remains unproven and unfalsified, which is very disappointing given the amount of time that has passed since Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) first emerged
Despite the many versions of the critical period discussed earlier, Lenneberg is aptly named as “father” of the CPH, to the extent that his 1967-vintage version of the hypothesis, postulating that the critical period affects all aspects of language and that it ends at puberty, is probably still the one that holds most sway
Summary
In SLA research, the age at which L2 acquisition begins has all but lost its status as a simple quasi-biological attribute and is widely recognized to be a ‘macrovariable’ (Flege et al 1999; cf. Birdsong 2018)—in other words, a complex combination of sociocultural and psychological variables. The one dimension in which some prominent CPH advocates (e.g., DeKeyser 2003; Johnson and Newport 1989) concede that the critical age has no role is that of formal education—for reasons having to do with the essential experiential difference between the normal language classroom and the naturalistic learning environment. In this position paper, we explore a number of areas, concluding that in the naturalistic sphere, the critical period notion remains unproven and unfalsified, which is very disappointing given the amount of time that has passed since CPH first emerged. We point out the main reasons that have contributed to this lack of progress and the unfortunate consequences of the lack of resolution of this controversy
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