Second Language Acquisition and the Critical Period Hypothesis

[rdearman]

Available on Google Books, Lots of pages omitted from the preview, but actually looks pretty good.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=d7OPAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA133&dq=french+pronunciation&ots=5uw9xMAsin&sig=5H_2lxAPhKMNTbk9hXT9z6IiV2k#v=onepage&q=french%20pronunciation&f=false

[emk]

Available on Google Books, Lots of pages omitted from the preview, but actually looks pretty good.

The key quotes from one of their studies:

lang-native-like-pronunciation-1.png

lang-native-like-pronunciation-2.png

This is actually a pretty common observation: Even if you look at the studies which support the idea that people over the age of 12 struggle to learn accents, there's almost always a small number of subjects—perhaps around 5% of people who have been fully immersed for years—whose accents sound native. Some people have a natural gift for accents. Some people, like Luca Lampariello and Idahosa Ness, make an intense study of accents:

• Luca Lampariello explains his techniques.
• Idahosa Ness pays a lot of attention to phonetic details, and uses recordings. He actually gave me feedback on a recording of my French, and he had a very good ear for vowels that were just a bit too closed, and consonants being articulated in the wrong spot, and so on.

Other polyglots (I think Alexander Arguelles was one) claim to have little natural gift for accents, and only achieve good ones via intensive, specialized work. For example, Arguelles met with a "professional phonetician" while living in Germany to improve his German accent.

Personally, I'm not too worried about removing the final traces of my native accent from my French. I'm always happy to improve, but I don't feel the need to be flawlessly perfect. I mean, my wife has been immersed in English professionally and socially for a long time, and she still has a faint French accent. But her faint French accent sounds closer the local New England accent than do the accents of many native speakers from California or the deep South. It would be kind of weird if she suddenly sounded exactly like she grew up here.

[dampingwire]

A google search for "Birdsong Second Language Acquisition and the Critical Period Hypothesis" produces quite a few hits, mostly from univeristy websites (and so I assume they are legal and not just random scans). None of them (on the first page at least ) exactly match that chapter, but they do seem to cover similar ground.

[Iversen]

I normally pick up the sound of a language when I'm in a place where it is spoken around me, where more or less everything I read is in that language and where have switched to thinking in that language - which only happens when I already am fairly advanced in it. At home I'm not very focussed on accents because the chance (or risk) that I might have to speak foreign languages at home are minimal - and in the few cases it happens I can generally survive on my low-peak competence, which I barely keep alive by thinking and by occasionally watching TV in foreign languages. This year I have spoken many languages during the Berlin get-together, a lot of Esperanto in Lille and French, Dutch, German and Spanish during travels. But in between my travels I don't speak other languages - I think them, and I write them, and that's it.

You can't really test this situation with a child, because almost no children try to keep their skills alive just by reading. And kids don't read grammar and they don't even know what wordlists are good for. So the only possible test is to put an adult into the contrary situation where a child learn to communicate in a new language by being submerged in a foreign language community. SO let's dump a ouple of kids and their parents in a market square in Bombay or Dar-es-Salaam, and it is probably fair to say that kids learn to speak to the native kids there faster than their parents learn to speak to their parents. But part of this is that they may be less inhibited in eliciting useful words and expression from the other kids, they don't try to say complicated things. and they know they have to try to speak like the local children if they want to communicate with them.

And while the kids play, their parents are sipping coffee at a table, where they speak to each other instead of abducting a native speaker. They may even have asked for their coffee in English (or whatever native language they have at their disposal).

There may be some physiological explanation behind the success of the kids and the relative failure of their parents (with a few dazzling exceptions). And personally I don't want to become a child again, not even to learn a new language. So the question is: could changes in the way adults learn to pronounce foreign languages ever compensate for the advantages of young learners? Some learners speak much more to other learners and maybe even native speakers than I do, but how many of them ever acquire a nativelike accent? Personally I think I would be able to perform better if I had a more visual sense of pronunciation, both single sounds and intonation, but the largest factor would simply be to get MORE time to analyse the way the locals speak. But I'm not willing to make the changes in my way of living and habits that could provide that.

[Senator Jack]

There may be some physiological explanation behind the success of the kids and the relative failure of their parents (with a few dazzling exceptions).

Though I lean toward cognitive linguistics, the cases of Genie and Victor the Wild Boy overwhelmingly support the existence of Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device. There's been some theory that adults might have some limited access to it, but personally, I don't buy it. Seems to me that once the LAD shuts down around puberty, SLA for adults is purely cognitive.

[Montmorency]

[

Personally, I'm not too worried about removing the final traces of my native accent from my French. I'm always happy to improve, but I don't feel the need to be flawlessly perfect. I mean, my wife has been immersed in English professionally and socially for a long time, and she still has a faint French accent. But her faint French accent sounds closer the local New England accent than do the accents of many native speakers from California or the deep South. It would be kind of weird if she suddenly sounded exactly like she grew up here.

Prof. Richard Werner is an example of someone who speaks very natural English, although he would not be taken as a native-speakling Brit. He teaches at a British university, did a post-graduate degree at Oxford, and has lived here a fair time (although also lived in Japan and speaks Japanese. I think he must have a certain natural talent for languages, although it's not his area of expertise, which is finance & banking).
He has a trace of an accent, but if I didn't know where he came from or could not guess from his surname, I wouldn't perceive it as a stereotypical German accent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDHSUgA29Ls

[emk]

And kids don't read grammar and they don't even know what wordlists are good for. So the only possible test is to put an adult into the contrary situation where a child learn to communicate in a new language by being submerged in a foreign language community. SO let's dump a ouple of kids and their parents in a market square in Bombay or Dar-es-Salaam, and it is probably fair to say that kids learn to speak to the native kids there faster than their parents learn to speak to their parents. But part of this is that they may be less inhibited in eliciting useful words and expression from the other kids, they don't try to say complicated things. and they know they have to try to speak like the local children if they want to communicate with them.

Though I lean toward cognitive linguistics, the cases of Genie and Victor the Wild Boy overwhelmingly support the existence of Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device. There's been some theory that adults might have some limited access to it, but personally, I don't buy it. Seems to me that once the LAD shuts down around puberty, SLA for adults is purely cognitive.

I suspect that Genie and Victor the Wild Boy are not very good data points from which to extrapolate anything about adult L2 (L3, etc.) acquisition. Genie was kept locked alone in a room, immobilized, beaten, and malnourished. Victor lived alone in the woods, and may have have suffered from a pre-existing mental illness. It's entirely possible that if a child doesn't learn some language before puberty—because of horrible abuse or abandonment—they may never develop ordinary human linguistic abilities. But adult language learners have not been deprived of human contact, and they have already learned at least one language to fluency. This puts them in a fundamentally different situation than Genie or Victor.

If we have a hypothesis about the differences between adult and child language learning, we need to untangle the variables involved, and test one at a time. And in the case of language acquisition, there are at least two obvious variables that we should consider:

1. The age of learning a language.
2. The quantity of exposure to a language and the need to speak it. Is the subject exposed to large quantities of comprehensible input? How miserable will their life be if they don't learn to speak the language well?

I have witnessed various combinations of these variables up close, over a number of years. Here are a few data points, though not enough to make a statistically valid sample:

• Age: Mid 20s. Exposure and necessity: Full professional and social immersion. Result: Easy conversational speech, almost flawlessly native grammar, only a light accent remains. Progress from B2 to near native without any explicit studying whatsoever.
• Age: Birth through start of school. Exposure and necessity: Extensively spoken to Language A, but able to reply in Language B. Result: Solid comprehension of language A, but very minimal active skills. Accent is fine, though.
• Age: Birth through start of school. Exposure and necessity: Language used in family and community. Results: Age-appropriate proficiency.
• (me) Age: Mid-30s. Exposure and necessity: Artificially created, and limited to too small an environment, but nonetheless significant. Results: Able to use the language in limited professional contexts. Accent is obviously non-native.

The remaining condition would be "adult, with no real need to the speak the new language", and the results of that can be easily observed anywhere in the world. But the pattern in these (very limited) data points seems obvious to me: Age affects accent, and may make the difference between flawlessly native grammar, and excellent grammar with rare faults. But exposure and necessity appear make the difference between incomprehension and professional and social fluency, regardless of age.

But what about "cognitive" learning versus a more "natural" style of learning? Well, I know far more French that I ever consciously learned, and there have been plenty of moments where I said something, then I thought, "That can't be grammatical," and finally I realized, several seconds later, that my intuitive grammar was more accurate than my conscious grammar. (It can go the other way, too, particularly with gender—I have some automatic French gender, but it was late arriving and it's still dodgy.) There is a "cognitive" component to my language learning, but I would estimate it at less than 20%.

I'm hugely optimistic about the ability of adults to learn languages to a very high (or even near-native) level with only haphazard study, because I've seen it first hand (and also witnessed it here a number of times on the forum).

[sfuqua]

This takes me back to fun, loud debates in graduate school.
We never convinced everybody of anything.
Some things are pretty obvious.
There are tons of anecdotes about adults who learned a language so well that they were indistinguishable from native speakers, but all the anecdotes I have tried to track down fall apart when examined carefully. Almost nobody, who starts learning a language after 20 or so, gets a perfect native speaker accent, or absolutely, completely 100% of the time native grammar.
It seems to me that there must be some sort of Critical Period, although that is no excuse not to learn a language as an adult. There is much friendship, adventure, joy, and love to be found from learning a foreign language well, even if it is learned imperfectly as an adult.

[Senator Jack]

I suspect that Genie and Victor the Wild Boy are not very good data points from which to extrapolate anything about adult L2 (L3, etc.) acquisition.

Agreed. We can't extrapolate anything about adult learning except to posit that IF the LAD does indeed exist and that it shuts down, adults have to rely purely on cognitive processes for SLA.

[*]The quantity of exposure to a language and the need to speak it. Is the subject exposed to large quantities of comprehensible input? How miserable will their life be if they don't learn to speak the language well?

Certainly, the quantity of input/intake is probably the most significant factor. I reiterate that I believe if an adult were exposed to the same seven years of constant input that a child gets, and IF the adult actively turned that input into INTAKE, then the adult would have a fairly good grasp of the language. Unfortunately, adults don't get that amount of input/intake taking a language class once per week, where he or she has to share the instructor's time with ten other students.

The ability of the adult to fall back on the L1 to try to be understood is a good point. Kids don't have that option. It's sink or swim for them.

But what about "cognitive" learning versus a more "natural" style of learning? Well, I know far more French that I ever consciously learned, and there have been plenty of moments where I said something, then I thought, "That can't be grammatical," and finally I realized, several seconds later, that my intuitive grammar was more accurate than my conscious grammar. (It can go the other way, too, particularly with gender—I have some automatic French gender, but it was late arriving and it's still dodgy.) There is a "cognitive" component to my language learning, but I would estimate it at less than 20%.

As a cog ling, I look at SLA in the same way as learning to be a concert pianist. Is there an innate skill for piano playing or does it only come with intense practice? If a fifty-year-old practiced the piano 10 hours per day, seven days per week, would he or she be as good as a concert pianist? Barring arthritis, I should think so. To me, language translation is like playing an instrument. You get faster and faster at what you do until you're not even thinking about it. You get that muscle memory in your fingers to mindlessly play the piano, guitar, what have you, and I think it might be the same with the brain. By the time you study a language for 10,000 hours, your brain is on autopilot. I'm not so sure this means that it's not a cog process, only that the cog process has been streamlined.

There are tons of anecdotes about adults who learned a language so well that they were indistinguishable from native speakers, but all the anecdotes I have tried to track down fall apart when examined carefully. Almost nobody, who starts learning a language after 20 or so, gets a perfect native speaker accent, or absolutely, completely 100% of the time native grammar.

Agreed. Yet, I have to wonder how many people really WANT to put in the 10,000 hours to perfect an accent when they know the natives can already understand them. To me, unless one is in the spy-biz, it seems like useless icing on the cake. I'd say that if you stick a non-native speaker in a room with 10 natives and he or she fools all of them, that's passing. I'd love to actually run this experiment some day.

Great discussion! Thanks to all!

[Senator Jack]

Well, I know far more French that I ever consciously learned, and there have been plenty of moments where I said something, then I thought, "That can't be grammatical," and finally I realized, several seconds later, that my intuitive grammar was more accurate than my conscious grammar. (It can go the other way, too, particularly with gender—I have some automatic French gender, but it was late arriving and it's still dodgy.) There is a "cognitive" component to my language learning, but I would estimate it at less than 20%.

I forgot there was something else I wanted to address about this. I've been taking French for five years now, and you're right, I seem to be building this intuition about gender. Apart from certain rules like 'all nouns that end in -age are masculine', I know there's no way to know if a noun is masc or fem, but I've noticed that lately I have been able to use the correct article based only on the word form rather than recall. Some words just seem to have a masc or fem quality to them. Of course, I'm not always right, but I've definitely been more right than wrong.